On 20 October 2026, Interim Commissioner of Competition Jeanne Pratt told the Canadian chapter of the International Institute of Communications in Ottawa that "barriers to switching are barriers to competition." The speech, titled "Competition Is a Process, Not a Destination," announced no new enforcement action. It is a statement of how the Bureau intends to think, and that makes it worth reading closely.
What Pratt actually said
The speech text makes a simple structural argument. A new competitor cannot effectively challenge established providers if customers face obstacles when trying to leave them. Pratt pointed to data portability as one remedy, saying that when consumers can securely and easily move their data between providers, barriers to switching fall. She tied that to the Bureau's earlier paper, Your Data, Your Control.
She then posed two open questions. Will AI reinforce advantages held by large incumbents? Could algorithmic pricing systems create barriers to consumer information or switching? Both were questions, not findings. The speech states no conclusion on either, and no investigation is attached to them.
Her framing of the Bureau's role is the part a pro-innovation reader should note: the challenge for competition authorities "is not to resist innovation," but to ensure markets remain open, contestable and competitive.
The strongest case for a more aggressive Bureau
The steelman for stronger intervention is easy to state. Digital markets tend to reward scale. Data accumulated by incumbents improves their products, which attracts more users and more data. If AI amplifies that loop, waiting for harm to be proven in court may mean acting only after the market has tipped. A regulator that merely asks questions, critics will say, is a regulator that will arrive late.
That case has force. But it argues for a specific tool, and portability happens to be one of the better candidates.
Why portability beats prohibition
Data portability works on the customer's side of the market. It does not tell a firm how to design a product, price a service or deploy a model. It lowers the cost of leaving, so that firms must keep customers by being better rather than by being sticky. That is proportionate regulation in practice: a narrow rule, a clear beneficiary, and competition doing the enforcement.
The Bureau's January 2026 release puts a number on it. For the insurance sector alone, a portability framework could save Canadians between $1.1 billion and $3.8 billion in annual costs, according to the Bureau. The findings draw on a survey of more than 3,000 Canadians, behavioural economics research and comparisons with other countries. The release notes that EU, UK and Australian jurisdictions are introducing their own frameworks. Canadian Press reporting carried by BNN Bloomberg broke the figure down to about $128 a year per household, plus a further $183 of time saved, in a home-insurance scenario.
These are the Bureau's own modelled estimates, not observed outcomes in Canada. The same reporting records the Bureau's caveat that portability "creates privacy and security challenges and can be costly to implement." A credible reader should hold both facts at once.
Where the speech is thin
The AI question is the interesting one, and it is where the Bureau should be most disciplined. "Will AI reinforce incumbents?" is a hypothesis, and the evidence for it is mixed. Foundation-model markets currently show heavy capital requirements at the top, but also rapid entry, open-weight alternatives and falling inference costs. A competition authority that treats scale itself as suspect risks penalising the investment Canada says it wants. The right posture is the one Pratt gestured at: watch for conduct that blocks switching or distorts consumer information, not for size.
Algorithmic pricing deserves the same restraint. Pricing software can facilitate coordination, and that is a legitimate enforcement concern under existing law. It can also simply help firms respond faster to demand and costs. The Bureau should say what evidence would distinguish the two before it chills ordinary pricing tools.
There is also a delivery problem. Portability only produces savings if people use it. In a Lexpert account of the January report, the Bureau's roadmap stresses consumer trust in oversight bodies, strong privacy protection, clear consent rules and high interoperability. Pratt made a similar point in her March 2026 remarks at Open Banking Expo Canada, warning that if consumers do not feel confident sharing data, adoption will be limited. A right on paper that nobody trusts delivers none of the competition benefits.
What to watch
The Bureau does not legislate. Portability depends on Parliament and on sector rules, and Budget 2025 committed to a data-mobility right under PIPEDA, according to the Bureau's release. Pratt's speech is advocacy aimed at that process.
Three tests will show whether this is substance or rhetoric. First, whether a portability right is actually enacted with enforceable interoperability standards. Second, whether the Bureau publishes evidence on AI and pricing before it proposes remedies. Third, whether it keeps to the line it drew itself: acting against obstacles to switching and consumer information, not against innovation.
Switching costs are a defensible target because they are measurable, and because lowering them helps entrants and customers without picking winners. If the Bureau holds to that discipline, the speech will look like a sound foundation. If it drifts toward treating AI scale as a problem in itself, the open, contestable markets Pratt describes will be harder to build.