On April 21, 2026, the Montreal firm Lex Group filed a proposed class action in the Superior Court of Quebec against Amazon.com, Inc., Amazon.ca, Inc., Amazon.com.ca ULC and Amazon Canada Fulfillment Services ULC. The suit covers anyone in Canada who bought on Amazon.ca or Amazon.com since January 1, 2018, and alleges that Amazon's Marketplace "fair pricing" policy — its price-parity rule — kept retail prices artificially high across competing online stores. Amazon told Daily Hive the "claims lack merit" and that it "looks forward to contesting them in court."
The filing does not exist in a vacuum. It mirrors, almost claim for claim, a probe the Competition Bureau has been running for years. The interesting question is not whether Amazon's policy is anticompetitive — that is genuinely unresolved — but what it means that a private plaintiff in Quebec is now litigating conduct a federal regulator has been investigating since 2020 without filing a case.
The same conduct, two tracks
The Bureau opened its Amazon inquiry in 2020. On July 8, 2025 it announced it had obtained a Federal Court order compelling Amazon to produce records, advancing an investigation into whether the Marketplace Fair Pricing Policy — first instituted in 2017 — is an abuse of dominance under the Competition Act. The policy lets Amazon penalize third-party sellers who list a product on Amazon.ca at a price significantly higher than what they offer elsewhere. The Bureau's theory is that this can raise sellers' costs, deter rivals, and dampen price competition across marketplaces. As of its last update, the Bureau had "no conclusion of wrongdoing."
The Quebec suit makes the consumer-facing version of that argument. According to the statement of claim as described by the filing firm and reported by MobileSyrup, Amazon allegedly contacted vendors when competitors undercut Amazon's price and pressed them to "fix," "correct," or "manage" those prices — using sellers as intermediaries to keep prices up across platforms. The pleading reportedly cites internal guidance that such conversations were "often better" held over the phone to avoid a paper trail. The claim invokes the Competition Act, Quebec's Consumer Protection Act, and the Civil Code, and seeks the gap between prices paid and prices that would have prevailed in a competitive market, plus punitive damages.
Why the private case got there first
The steelman for aggressive scrutiny of price-parity clauses is strong, and worth stating plainly. "Most-favoured-nation" or platform-parity rules can soften cross-platform competition: if a seller cannot undercut its Amazon price on a rival site, the rival has little reason to compete on price, and the platform's high commissions get baked into what every shopper pays. European regulators reached exactly that conclusion against Booking.com's parity clauses, and Germany banned them outright. A dominant platform with roughly 42% of Canadian retail e-commerce — Amazon's estimated 2025 share — is precisely the actor where this concern is most plausible.
That is the case for someone going after this conduct. The notable thing is who got there first, and why. On June 20, 2025, the private-enforcement provisions of Bill C-59 came into force, the most dramatic expansion of private competition enforcement in a generation. Private parties can now seek leave to bring abuse-of-dominance applications to the Competition Tribunal under a far lower threshold — including a new, undefined "public interest" test — and, for the first time, can win monetary awards up to the value of the benefit the dominant firm derived. Parliament deliberately built a second engine for antitrust enforcement precisely so that the Bureau would no longer be the only mover.
The Quebec action runs through the civil-class-action route rather than the Tribunal, but the logic is the same: the law now invites private actors to pursue conduct the regulator is still building a record on. That is the regime working as designed, not a system failing.
The proportionality problem
From a pro-innovation, evidence-based standpoint, this is where caution is warranted. Price parity is not illegal per se in Canada, and there are legitimate efficiency arguments for it — chiefly preventing "free-riding," where a seller uses Amazon's logistics, traffic and trust to win a customer, then diverts the sale to a cheaper site that carries none of those costs. Whether Amazon's policy crosses from that into consumer harm is an empirical question about market power and effects, exactly the kind of question the Bureau's compelled-records process is built to answer rigorously.
Litigation-led enforcement carries real costs. A vague public-interest leave standard and an untested disgorgement remedy create a wide band of legal uncertainty, and uncertainty of that magnitude is itself a tax on marketplace investment — borne not only by Amazon but by the smaller platforms and sellers watching how the rules land. Parallel proceedings also risk inconsistent factual findings on identical conduct, and Canadian courts have shown they will scrutinize these claims hard: the Federal Court dismissed an earlier multi-billion-dollar Amazon pricing class action in 2022.
The better sequencing is for the Bureau's evidence-driven inquiry to lead and for private claims to build on a proven record, not to substitute litigation risk for proof of harm. If Amazon's parity policy demonstrably inflates Canadian prices, it should be remedied — through findings, not leverage. The Quebec case is a useful test of whether Canada's new private-enforcement architecture sharpens that process or simply front-runs it.