On the Social Welfare Objectives of Canada's Antitrust Statute

The Competition Act is arguably one of the most economically sophisticated legal statutes ever enacted in Canada. As such, it has been argued that the paramount objective of the merger provisions of the Competition Act should be the promotion of economic efficiency. This paper examines the underlying normative objective of Canadian merger law from a positive perspective by looking at the legal framework established in Canadian jurisprudence. An argument is developed that demonstrates the existence of distributional objections to wealth redistribution caused by an increase in market power with respect to the status quo allocation of economic resources. This social welfare objective is inconsistent with the commonly held view of the functions of competition policy institutions in Canada.