Joint Ventures In Canada

This chapter provides a brief overview of the treatment of joint ventures under Canada's Competition Act (the Act).¹

The expression 'joint venture' lacks a consensus meaning in Canadian competition law and is often used to describe any of a wide variety of cooperative arrangements between firms, ranging from short-term, loose contractual alliances to more permanent and comprehensive structural integrations. The words 'joint venture' appear twice in the Act, in both cases in relation to a limited exemption to the merger review process.² However, for reasons touched on below, those statutory exemptions are of little practical relevance and do not connote the broader sense in which 'joint venture' is typically used in Canada. Therefore, for purposes of this chapter, the expression 'joint venture' will be more generically employed to encompass any form of inter-firm cooperative arrangement that falls shy of outright merger. Such arrangements are more commonly referred to in Canada as