Canadian Competition Bureau Releases Revised Merger Enforcement Guidelines

The changes in the revised Merger Enforcement Guidelines are unlikely to have much practical significance in the vast majority of cases.

The Canadian Competition Bureau has issued a revised version of its 1991 Merger Enforcement Guidelines (MEGs)¹. The principal thrust of the changes is to update the MEGs to reflect developments in mainstream antitrust thinking, enforcement practice and the courts in three main areas:

1. Competitive effects:
The MEGs now describe in greater detail the factors considered by the Bureau in assessing whether a merger is likely to facilitate the exercise of market power by the merged entity (a) unilaterally, or (b) in oligopolistic coordination with other firms. This section of the MEGs simply codifies existing practice and largely parallels the 1992 U.S. Horizontal Merger Guidelines.