By Michelle Arnold and Kiran Gill | Part of our Special Series: The Ownership Solution
In recent years, Canadians have watched something change quietly in the economy around them. All of a sudden, there is upselling at the dentist, prices for veterinary care are higher than they used to be and the terms of a gym membership can change out of the blue, with no notice.
In many cases, these threats to day-to-day affordability are the byproduct of what competition experts call serial acquisitions—a pattern of larger firms buying up a series of smaller players to try and corner the market.
The smaller size of these individual transactions means they often fly under the radar of Canada’s Competition Bureau because they’re not big enough to trigger automatic scrutiny.
This makes serial acquisitions notoriously difficult for the government to detect and track, and even more challenging to curb.
The good news is that the Competition Bureau is aware of the negative impact of these quiet deals and is proposing updates to its Merger Enforcement Guidelines, which Social Capital Partners provided formal feedback on. The guideline updates clearly acknowledge the potential negative impacts of serial acquisitions.
This is real progress, reflecting years of advocacy across Canada by an array of organizations, including Social Capital Partners, and a growing recognition that competition policy must address how modern business consolidation actually happens.
But, these new guidelines will also inevitably act as an important test.
Because, while the new guidelines have been in the process of being updated, firms have quietly continued to buy up more companies in sectors across the country.
In 2025 alone, Neighbourly Pharmacy, which bills itself as “Canada’s largest and fastest growing network of community pharmacies,” announced the acquisition of 33 independent Canadian pharmacies. WELL Health expanded its footprint of independent health clinics again, following earlier waves of acquisitions. And U.S.-based AIR Control Concepts entered the Canadian HVAC market to buy up multiple businesses across Ontario and Atlantic Canada.
We can’t say for sure that any of these particular deals will have negative impacts on their customers or communities, but at a time when Canadians are having trouble making ends meet, the evidence shows that consolidations like these come with real risks to both quality and affordability.
Research from the United States has found that consolidation in healthcare services often leads to worse quality of care, while prices for consumers don’t improve—and sometimes even rise. Similar research on the heating and cooling industry shows that, in markets where HVAC competition quietly erodes, prices increase.
The new updated guidelines now explicitly state that a series of acquisitions will be able to be assessed as a whole—often referred to as a “roll-up” of many smaller deals. This is good progress, but this new authority will matter only if it is exercised.
To give the new Merger Enforcement Guidelines teeth, and to stay on top of these quiet consolidations, the Competition Bureau will need to be aggressive with enforcement.
That will mean tracking firms that are actively pursuing acquisition-led growth strategies, using their market-study powers to examine sectors prone to incremental consolidation and improving transparency around merger review results so Canadians can understand how decisions are being made.
The proposed Merger Enforcement Guidelines show clearly that Canada’s competition policymakers understand the problem they are trying to solve.
A fair and competitive economy does not emerge by accident. It requires rules which constrain the consolidation that gives a small number of companies outsized power to set prices, and the tools and resources to monitor behaviour and enforce those rules.
These guidelines can play an important role in keeping prices from quietly creeping up, preventing bigger firms from creating unfair playing fields that hurt small and new businesses and ensuring that Canada’s economy doesn’t concentrate even more wealth and power in the hands of a small number of players. The question now is whether we will be able to follow through.
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From Guidelines to Action: Feedback on the Proposed Merger Enforcement Guidelines
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