For the Counterfactual Podcast’s first recording in front of a live audience, Matt Chiasson, Senior Policy Advisor at the Competition Bureau provides insights into his role and recent and ongoing policy work relating to the Competition Act amendments.
In this episode of the Counterfactual podcast, we hear from Matt Chaisson, a Senior Policy Advisor, about his career and responsibilities at the Competition Bureau, particularly relating to the process and experiences around the adoption of recent amendments to the Competition Act. This is the second episode of the new “Better Know the Bureau” series where we “demystify” the Competition Bureau and better get to know the people that make up the Competition Bureau and the work that they do.
00:01.34
Kate McNeece
OK, everyone, we are back up and running. Thank you for your patience as we sorted out our technical difficulties. So welcome to Counterfactual Live.
00:41.67
Kate McNeece
For those of you in the room today, I'm Kate McNeece. I'm the host of the Counterfactual Podcast. We're very grateful for you for joining us on this rainy Wednesday evening in Ottawa. I want to give a special thanks to all of you for joining us, to all of our listeners for listening to Counterfactual over the last couple of years, to Blakes for hosting us here in their Ottawa office. We really appreciate that. And to the CBA for supporting the podcast as we continue to grow. This is our third season and we've got some really exciting stuff coming for you, so please keep tuning in. So with that, I will pass things over to our host for the evening, Julia Potter.
01:14.40
Julia Potter
Hello, everyone. It's so great to be doing this in front of a live audience. We don't normally get to see you all looking at us, so it'll be a new experience to do these recordings. So getting into our episode, tonight I'll be interviewing Matt Chiasson, who's an economist and senior policy advisor at the Canadian Competition Bureau.
01:39.27
Julia Potter
And this interview is part of our new Better Know the Bureau series, in which we will be finding out a bit more about who's running the Bureau, a bit more about them and their roles and responsibilities. And we recorded our first episode, which will be released on September 26th, where I interviewed Anu Lalith Kumar at the MINU at the Bureau.
01:49.65
Julia Potter
So for our live audience that's coming out tomorrow and for our listeners, that will be some time in the past. So you should all go and check that one out too. So I'm not going to do much more introduction onto Matt because it's better to hear from him about his career and his work at the Bureau. So on that note, Matt, can you please tell us a bit about your career path and how you got started at the Bureau and what inspired you to take this career path?
02:23.63
Matt Chiasson
Sure, sure. Well, thanks, Julia. Thanks for the invitation to be on the podcast. I'm a huge fan of the pod. I think I've listened to every episode. I usually listen to them on two times speed or three times speed at Spotify, but it's just as enjoyable even at that fast pace. I do have to give the standard disclaimer, I just wrote it down, I think I've memorized it. I'm here at a personal capacity. The views are my own. They don't represent views of the Bureau or the Government of Canada.
02:50.71
Matt Chiasson
So, about my career journey, I guess I joined the Bureau in kind of a weird way. I started studying math, I think you studied math as well, [Julia Potter] I sure did [Matt Chiasson] and you know it kind of got a little abstract and I read a book, Freakonomics, and it's been embarrassing to confess that that was the book that you know made me pivot to economics.
03:09.37
Matt Chiasson
It was you know a way to kind of understand social phenomena, apply stats, apply principles of math to you know explain the world. So I did a minor in Econ and then I did my Master's at Queens. And at that time, Queens was a big feeder school to the Bureau. Roger Ware was a professor there. He taught a big IO class.
03:30.82
Matt Chiasson
And so the Bureau came and did a recruitment push, and they presented on their work. They explained how important economists are to the work of the Bureau and how important the work of the Bureau is to the economy. So that was really appealing. And they did a case study of a movie theater merger. And it just stuck with me, how they apply in economics to you know figure out what would happen to prices after the merger. and so I was hooked, I applied, I got in and I joined the Bureau from there. So I think there were six people from my grad class that actually joined the Bureau out of that recruitment year and five of them are still there. So that's 16 years ago. So that kind of goes to show how interesting the work is, how there's lots of different opportunities to move around. And so I'm glad I'm still there.
04:17.43
Julia Potter
yeah That's great. It seems like you get one little taste of it and then you're hooked in and that's how we get people into this world of ours. So you're currently working as an economist and senior policy advisor. What does that mean? Can you give us some information about what your role entails and what your main responsibilities are?
04:13.02
Matt Chiasson
So yeah, I'm a senior policy advisor and I work in our policy planning and advocacy directorate. And everything is an acronym in government. So that the acronym for our group is PPAD, which is kind of an unfortunate acronym.
04:49.11
Julia Potter
I understand why I've never heard of it before.
04:51.48
Matt Chiasson
So it's a bit hard to explain, but I think, crudely, you could think of it like the government relations department for the Bureau. So we do kind of intergovernmental work. We do parliamentary affairs. We monitor what's going on.
05:05.13
Matt Chiasson
you know, when we get called to appear and testify, we help our officials do that. We do a lot of competition advocacy in regulated sectors. We have a whole planning team that does our annual reports and our performance measurement. So it's a pretty cool group, a lot of horizontal work. Very different from enforcement, but a lot of us have worked in enforcement, so we bring that perspective. In terms of my responsibilities, I'm kind of a rover, I think because I've been around, I've work abroad, I've worked different parts of the Bureau. I kind of just go where there's a need and whether that's helping with a speech or you know helping with a submission, I do that, so
05:43.97
Matt Chiasson
the last few years, my work has mainly been on advocating for amendments to the Competition Act. So we've been pretty successful on that front, both first in securing a budget increase and then in getting three rounds of amendments. So it's been a lot of work advocating for those and appearing before committees to help parliamentarians understand those reforms, but it's been really fulfilling as well.
06:08.97
Julia Potter
That's great. So it sounds like you cover quite a bit in your job. What do you find the most fulfilling and, on the other side, what are some of the challenges that you face?
06:16.73
Matt Chiasson
Yeah, so I think if you ask the people at the Bureau that question most will say the same thing: the thing is, it's about working in the public interest. It's the mandate. So that's why people stay so long because when you're working to protect and promote competition, you know it's kind of easy to enjoy your job. Competition is really important to consumers, to businesses, to entrepreneurs,
06:38.57
Matt Chiasson
it's kind of fundamental to make the economy work smoothly. So I guess that's what I love, especially now. I guess you could say competition's probably never been more important or more top of mind, at least. We've just gone through a major period of high inflation. So that focuses minds on how competition is working. Is it working for them? We also are in a period where we have really slow growth.
07:05.96
Matt Chiasson
And competition is meant to be a tool to stimulate growth. So we've really been trying to make the case that Canada needs more competition, not just through strengthening the Competition Act, but by you know promoting competition in other policy areas and regulated sectors. So that's been really interesting. I would say, I guess, in terms of the challenges, when you work in policy, there's a lot of challenges about dealing with the environment that you are in. So, right now, a minority parliament setting, is— it's difficult to move the needle, but there's been a lot of convergence on the need to do something. So we've really tried to you know focus on making the case for competition reform. The evidence is not always the best in Canada in terms of
08:01.42
Matt Chiasson
doing retrospectives and doing research, but we tried to draw on international best practices and make the links and the other thing is some things are maybe the optimal policy, but they're not feasible or are they're not a priority or maybe they sound good in theory, but they wouldn't be very administrable or scalable. So that's the kind of thing that makes my work difficult because you need to really advocate for policies that can actually work on the ground. But that's also what makes it fun.
08:37.98
Julia Potter
Yeah, it's been interesting. And so as you've mentioned, and as our audience, of course, knows well, the last few years have been very significant in terms of changes to the Competition Act with the amendments. And there's just a generally increased awareness among, you know, everyday Canadians about competition law policies. So how has your role and the department really changed with that as the backdrop over the last few years?
09:00.75
Matt Chiasson
So it's been huge. I've got a few examples written down. I'll try to go through them. But it used to be that if we found an article that was about our work, it would be a race to send it around because they were few and far between. But now when you, anytime you open the clippings or you look at the paper, there's stuff on our work. so it's like drinking from a fire hose in terms of the level of attention and scrutiny about competition issues, which I think is actually a good thing. I did a little analysis, I'm a bit of a stats nerd.
09:36.75
Julia Potter
It's the math thing I'm coming through
09:38.01
Matt Chiasson
you know I was just kind of curious because a lot of this public interest in the work, there's podcasts, there's articles, there's new think tanks, it's filtering up to the political level. So you can actually search on open parliament, do keyword searches to see how frequent some terms are being used.
09:58.97
Matt Chiasson
And so of curiosity, I looked you know for terms like the Competition Bureau, Competition Act, Cartel, Merger, Oligopoly, all of these words last year were used more times in the House than any time going back to 1994 when the data was there. So I think it just goes to show that it's something that's top of mind. The Bureau, we sometimes get called before parliamentary committees. When I first joined the policy team, it might have been once or twice a year.
10:25.79
Matt Chiasson
But we've appeared 10 times in the last 10 months before eight different committees across the House and the Senate. And it's not just appearances on the amendments, it's appearances on thematic things like AI, food pricing, telecom pricing, fisheries. So it's clearly a thing that's cutting across different verticals, I guess I'd say, and so you know it's made our work you know really exciting but also really busy. we've had, last year, I think for the first time ever, all three major political parties had a competition reform bill. The government had two. And those two passed and they folded in a lot of the proposals from the opposition parties. so you normally don't see, at least in Canada, competition amongst the political parties
11:19.01
Matt Chiasson
on the competition file, which is something new. So there's good things about, I think, the increased political attention. I'm on a panel actually tomorrow, but for your listeners, I guess it'll be in the past, but it's about the politicization of competition law. And I think it's, you know, we're talking a lot about some of the downsides of it, but I'm going to try to make the point that there is some upside as well. you know I think a lot of folks in the Bar felt that the Bureau needed to have more resources. you know there was a long period throughout the 2000s where our budget was kind of flat, but inflation was happening. and so it meant that you know over the span of you know a good decade or more, we lost about 100 people because our budget was the same, but it was spread over
12:10.21
Matt Chiasson
less staff. It's hard to make the case for a major budget increase if your work is politically irrelevant. So that's one nice thing about people caring about our work is that we're now increasing our resources and that's going to help us do more good work. The other good thing, and I think this is a positive development, is just that from an accountability standpoint, it's good for the Bureau to be appearing for parliamentary committees.
12:41.91
Matt Chiasson
you know, answering tough questions about our work, our priorities, what results we're achieving and so on. So when you're only appearing once a year or less, there's not that same opportunity to talk about what you're doing and to explain what you're delivering for Canadians. So I think overall, it's been a good thing that we've seen this groundswell of support for competition. You know, I'm just looking forward to the next few years to see where it goes from there.
12:11.96
Julia Potter
Absolutely. and so of course, you're doing work at the Competition Bureau. How does your work differ than the competition policy work that's happening at ISED?
13:20.11
Matt Chiasson
Yeah, that's a good question. So our policy work is more in the vein of competition advocacy. So we would advise government as the enforcer on changes to the law, or if they're considering changes, we can provide feedback on what we think the impact of that would be. The folks at ISED are really doing sort of the capital-P policy work, so they're running consultations, they're hearing from other stakeholders.
13:47.45
Matt Chiasson
not just the Bureau, and trying to weigh those viewpoints and try to strike a balance. And they are ultimately the ones providing the final advice to the minister and the government on changes. So I guess I'd see us as more in a kind of a stakeholder in that process, an advocate or an arms-length advisor, but ISED is really doing the real policy work.
13:12.81
Julia Potter
That's great. So you've mentioned some other areas of legislation as well. So in light of the changes to the Competition Act, and the Bureau has a stated support for a whole of government approach to competition, have there been changes relating to how the Bureau is engaging with other Canadian legislation or touching on competition issues and other consultations for those statutes as well?
14:34.01
Matt Chiasson
Yeah, so, that's another really good question. And maybe I'll talk a little bit about the Bureau's competition advocacy mandate. so I think mostly were known for our enforcement role, reviewing mergers, investigating cartels and opposite practices. And that's our core mandate. But we also have a competition advocacy mandate. It's something that was expressly put in the law and then in the 1970s, the idea was that sometimes there's competition problems in the economy that aren't because anyone's doing anything anti-competitive, but because just the regulations are such that there's barriers to entry or there's barriers to expansion
15:17.44
Matt Chiasson
or there's barriers to consumer switching. And the idea was it'd be nice to have a body with specialized expertise that could advise the government on these types of regulatory barriers, talk about maybe alternative ways of achieving the regulatory goal in a more competition-friendly way.
15:36.91
Matt Chiasson
So the Bureau was given that responsibility in the 1970s, and throughout the 70s and 80s, we were really involved in the sort of liberalization and deregulation agenda. And it's been a part of our work ever since, but different commissioners maybe put different priority on the advocacy function versus the enforcement function. And lately, we've been trying to do a lot of both. And we've been promoting this idea that what we really need to basically expand on the changes that were made to the Competition Act is a whole of government approach to competition. And what we mean by that is that,
15:19.22
Matt Chiasson
we need to start thinking about competition policies, not just the Competition Act, but any regulations, policies that we have that could affect competition. Whether that's transport, whether that's telecom, whether that's our internal trade barriers, we need to be thinking with of things with a competition lens. So the example I give, just to put this in context, because I do like numbers, the Bureau estimates that we save Canadians something like $3 billion dollars a year through all of our enforcement work.
16:48.91
Matt Chiasson
If you look at something like foreign direct investment restrictions, there's been some studies that say if we could bring those restrictions to the OECD level so that our environment was as, if you like, open to foreign investment as the OECD average, that could boost the economy by $10 billion a year.
16:07.40
Matt Chiasson
So three times what the Bureau achieves, which is a lot with 500 people, but it's still, you could get orders of magnitude more. If you look at internal trade barriers, there's good research that really what we're talking about there is about $100 billion dollars in cost to the economy from a myriad of small differences in regulation or trade barriers that affect inter-provincial trade. So if you think that we have 500 people working to get 3 billion in the Competition Act,
17:36.80
Matt Chiasson
In theory, you could justify 30 times that to work on internal trade, but we don't. So we've been promoting this idea that we need do need to invest in those areas and do need to scale up our efforts because the overall economic benefit could be massive. And what Canada really needs right now is to do everything we can to address the productivity because that's key to ensuring that we have good living standards over the long term. So we've been holding summits on this. Our commissioner published an op-ed on this over the summer that made some waves. I think we're seeing a lot of traction for this idea because there's a lot of pent-up interest in doing more on the competition file. And we're trying to channel those efforts to, to some of these other areas.
18:28.40
Julia Potter
Yeah, so, there's certainly been a lot of change in the past and from your perspective and, to the extent you can speak to these kinds of issues, where do you think the competition policy is headed and what can we expect going forward, whether that's amendments or just other changes?
18:44.01
Matt Chiasson
So, it's hard to say. There's no consultation right now on further changes to the Act, but as I was saying before, and this is just based on my own following of parliamentary committees, there's still some interest, I think, in doing more to open up competition in Canada. What form that takes, it's not entirely, entirely clear. So we've been pretty focused lately on just implementing the reforms we have. There's a lot of work for us in terms of updating our guidelines,
19:16.00
Matt Chiasson
running some cases, testing the law. We have a market study going on right now under the new powers. So we're trying to re remain focused on that, but also doing more advocacy for a whole-government approach. Maybe one thing I'll just add on that, that I didn't mention in my earlier response, this whole government idea is not something that we invented, it's something that other countries have experimented with. Australia is one of the examples we point to most often, so in the 90s, they had something called the National Competition Policy, and what they did is they basically did a huge stock review of something like 1,000 laws.
19:35.32
Matt Chiasson
and looked at them with a competition lens and asked, are there things here that you no longer need? Are there things that we can tweak to allow for more competition but still achieve the goal? And some of that stuff was not just at the federal level, but at their state and territorial level. And what they did was they incentivized reforms at those levels by basically having transfer payments. And the idea was that if states and territories put in place pro-competitive reforms, it would grow the economy, there'd be spillover effects that would benefit the economy as a whole, so those states and territories that took those steps should share in those gains, so
20:37.00
Matt Chiasson
It was actually kind of a clever economic incentive tool and it worked really, really well. They studied the impact of those reforms in the early 2000s and found that it had led to a permanent 2.5% boost in GDP, which is like $5,000 per household in Australia. It's not, you know, it's not small potatoes.
20:59.39
Matt Chiasson
The US has been experimenting with this now through their White House Competition Council. Basically, the administration had an executive order and what they did is they set out something like 72 initiatives spread across 12 departments and agencies to open up markets to our competition. And they set up a competition council that would meet and coordinate and report on their outcomes
21:25.65
Matt Chiasson
over time, so this was kind of like a whole government strategy and Tim Wu talked about this at our summit last year and it seems to have paid some really big dividends. They've gotten a lot done just by writing it down, having it set from the top in terms of the tone and having a structured institutionalized process to monitor progress over time. So maybe there's something like that we could do in Canada. Other countries have done similar things in terms of stock reviews and there's best practices for how to do that. So we're going to continue to promote that.
22:06.90
Julia Potter
I think now we'll shift things back a bit to the personal side of things. So it'd be great if you have a memorable or impactful moment from your career that shaped your perspective, if you want to share that with our listeners.
21:21.65
Matt Chiasson
I was going to say, I was just telling Charles Tingley in the room, I was going to share an anecdote about Adam Fanaki. So when I first joined the Bureau early in my career in the Mergers branch, Adam Fanaki was the head of that branch and he was a brilliant, brilliant guy and so well respected and so easy to get along with and he was nominally running the mergers branch, but he was feeding in on everything because he was such a valuable asset to the Bureau. He kind of ran point on the 2009 amendments.
22:56.64
Matt Chiasson
And he was extremely passionate about competition policy and getting it right. One of his areas that he was really passionate about was fixing our cartel provision, section 45. So, I mean, listeners will probably know this, but we had a weird provision that, you know, in some ways was overly broad because it encompassed a whole bunch of agreements that could be benign, potentially expose them to criminal sanction.
23:25.01
Matt Chiasson
but also had this undueness test which made it really hard to actually apply. So you could have things like hardcore price fixing happen and it wasn't necessarily illegal unless competition was lessened unduly. So he was really behind the charge to move to the two-track system where we have a per se offence for hardcore cartels and a civil provision for the less clear cut stuff. What kind of jumps out to me is after those amendments passed, he had us over to his house for a summer party and he was kind of just reflecting, and he was saying there were a lot of late nights and sometimes his wife would say, Adam, you know, you're working too late. You got to, you know, this better be about section 45.
24:15.73
Matt Chiasson
Which I, you know, find amusing because it means that she knew what section 45 was. But also that they would have a family arrangement that that was a justification for working late.
24:29.73
Julia Potter
I guess the whole family was on board.
24:31.36
Matt Chiasson
I have a young family myself now, and there's been some late nights in the last couple of years, too, working on amendments that I think are important. So I've thought about that a lot. And what's crazy and, you know, I don't know if you believe in a higher power or what, but a few months ago, it was March, I got a random message from someone, I think an old assistant of Adam's, they were cleaning all his files. And they said they found some binders from his parliamentary committee prep from these 2009 amendments. And they heard maybe I would be interested in having them. And this was right when C-59 was going on and we were doing our own prep. And so I said, yes, absolutely, I'll pay the courier, send it to me. And there's these two three-inch binders.
25:17.42
Matt Chiasson
And, you know, there must be 500 pages of material in there and it just reminded me how thorough he was. and sometimes I think amendments happen and it looks like a chaotic process and it looks like maybe it was ill-considered but there's oftentimes a real serious person behind the scenes that's thinking hard and trying to get it right. So I keep that as a bit of a memento of Adam. So that means a lot.
24:43.03
Julia Potter
Yeah, that's nice, it's a sign, with your work right now. And last for you, this is my favorite question to ask our guests. What is something about you that people would find surprising?
25:56.45
Matt Chiasson
I don't know if this is surprising, but I'm an accredited sommelier. So I worked abroad and I kind of developed a love for wine and there's a really great program at Algonquin College. It took three years of night classes, but no intentions of working in a restaurant or anything like that, but just love wine, love learning about it. And yeah, so I'm usually the one that's picking the wines for family dinners and having people over for tastings. So a little less now that I have small kids, but no, it's a passion of mine.
26:40.03
Julia Potter
That's great. Next time, we'll get you to help plan this event.
26:45.02
Matt Chiasson
We spun through that really quick. I don't mind taking questions or continuing to chat. I think we've only been recording for 26 minutes.
26:51.03
Julia Potter
Yeah, that's fine. Does anybody have a question, Josh? Do you want to, I don't know, come closer? You're already pretty close.
26:58.03
Audience
So just if someone's listening to this and is inspired by your career path, what advice would you have for them if they wanted to end up roughly where you are today?
27:09.03
Matt Chiasson
Oh, good question. Yeah, I don't know because the path I took was pretty random, but I do have a lot of people reaching out on LinkedIn. By the way, if you don't follow me on LinkedIn,a give me a follow. I try to post nerdy content on there all the time.
27:27.00
Matt Chiasson
We are hiring a lot. We are hiring not just economists anymore, not just lawyers anymore, but people from a lot of backgrounds, so if you're doing an MPP, if you're doing an MBA, if you have an interest in competition stuff, just write to the Bureau. We have a have a portal now where you can upload your CV. We have a talent team that you can get in touch with. You can send me a private message on LinkedIn and I can help you get in touch, so I mean I think right now our work is touching so many different areas that we're hiring behavioral scientists, people with technical skills, people with AI expertise, so the channels to get into the Bureau aren't the same as they used to be, where you had to go to Queens and take Roger Ware's class. You can take a lot of different paths.
28:27.06
Audience
You touched upon working internationally. Can you share a bit more about that?
28:28.72
Matt Chiasson
Yeah, I got really lucky where there were two opportunities to work at different times. One was at the UK Competition Authority. It was called the Office of Fair Trading at the time. Now it's folded into the Competition and Markets Authority.
28:44.02
Matt Chiasson
That was a really cool experience, just learning how the UK does things, which was quite different than what we were doing. Their merger regime there was voluntary. Ours is obviously, has a pre-merger notification system. I did a lot of work supporting their executive office there, so I learned how they structure things, which was really cool.
29:06.02
Matt Chiasson
And then after that, a few years later, there was an opportunity to go work at the OECD. And the OECD is an international body that basically brings countries together to develop best practices in a bunch of areas. But they have a competition policy group. And so when I worked there, I got to basically organize international roundtables
29:26.93
Matt Chiasson
on different topics, write background notes, help set up these discussions, and that was really eye-opening because I was really working with people from all over the world. So I found that a really useful experience for me because a lot of what I've been doing since then has been international comparative work, you know, pointing to, you know,
29:51.56
Matt Chiasson
how things are done in other countries and trying to tease out whether those are things that are portable to Canada. Sometimes they're not. Sometimes there's things that make sense, where it makes sense to be different, others where it doesn't. So I think I've tried to use that experience where I could- where I can, but recognizing its limits as well.
30:13.56
Julia Potter
How long were you abroad for?
30:15.32
Matt Chiasson
So in in the UK, it was about a year and in OECD, it was a year as well. Yeah and The Bureau is actually a good place to work if you're interested in international work as well because basically every country has a competition law. If you're working on merger cases, often there's a cross-border element where you're having to work with other competition agencies. Often it's the US, but it could be Australia, it could be the UK, it could be the EU, so it's really interesting.
30:43.81
Matt Chiasson
There's often conferences, things like that, where you can you travel and meet other people doing competition policy and exchange best practices and learn from each other. So it's actually a really, really great environment from that point of view.
31:01.68
Audience
So the recent Competition Act commitments that you touched on are kind of wide ranging and touch on really sort of every element of the Competition Act. Is there one in particular that, could you pick a favorite or one that you think is particularly impactful. And of course speaking on a personal basis.
31:19.13
Matt Chiasson
No, it's a good question. If Adam's was section 45, I think mine was probably section 96. I wrote about the efficiencies defense quite a few years before these amendments, making the case that I thought that it wasn't necessarily advancing efficiency in Canada. So I was glad that that was repealed. I know that many thought we should have hung on to it, but I still think there's ways to accommodate efficiency argents in our work without it being a standalone defense, which had a lot of administrability issues, and I think most at least agreed on that point.
32:05.84
Matt Chiasson
I almost wore a shirt tonight. I decided not to because I wasn't sure how it would be interpreted, but I have a shirt that I can maybe best describe as like a Stone Cold Steve Austin type shirt. Instead of saying Austin 316, it just has a bunch of amendments with a check mark next to it, but I didn't want it to look like a flex or...
32:33.06
Matt Chiasson
But no, the efficiency defense was a big one. I'm really pretty proud of the market study powers. I'm pretty proud of the strengthening of our private access regime. I think even though the Bureau is not going to be using it, I think I think that's going to have really good benefits from the point of view of decentralizing enforcement a little bit and expanding the case law. I think it might have good impacts for the culture of competition law in Canada to have more people lawyering in that area on the plaintiff side. So yeah, I think the future is pretty bright.
33:05.05
Audience
Sorry, I have so many questions. I think oftentimes when we look at other international competition agencies, we think about, you know, what can Canada learn from these enforcers? But my question is, what do you think the world can learn from our competition Bureau?
33:23.86
Matt Chiasson
That's a really good question. I think I was talking about the advocacy role. I think we were ahead of the curve on that one where, like I said, in the 1970s, the decision was made that we would basically give the enforcer another mandate to advocate for competition. I think we were sort of leaders in that regard. I think the US was doing some work informally, but I don't think that that was part of the toolkit in a lot of other countries. And now, pretty much every competition agency has an advocacy mandate alongside their enforcement one.
34:00.00
Matt Chiasson
And like for all the reasons I've mentioned, I think it's quite important. I think the Bureau has been very good at deploying that. So I think other countries can learn from that. I would say though that the like the culture around competition hasn't always been the strongest. And I think that's where we can learn from some other countries that maybe have been more willing to embrace competition policy.
34:30.02
Matt Chiasson
So the Bureau doing what it can on the advocacy front. But in an ideal world, we would have a broader community, and we're starting to see it. But, you know, independent economists, you know, think tanks, you know, thought leaders contributing to the debate. And I think, you know, the last few years that community has developed, it's less of a clubby kind of, you know, just the Bar, just the Bureau talking about the work. But I think that probably needs to grow a lot more. So I would say.
35:01.21
Julia Potter
Any other questions?
35:05.90
Audience
With Thanksgiving coming around the corner, what would you pair with a turkey dinner?
35:13.77
Matt Chiasson
So no question, the best wine for turkey dinner is Pinot Noir.
35:16.07
Matt Chiasson
Ah, yeah, it's well, I think because Pinot Noir kind of gives a cranberry-type note and so you think of it like the cranberry sauce for the turkey dinner, high acid, you know, it kind of goes with a lot of things. It's usually not, it's a light bodied So that's what I would go with and if you're into the whites, I would probably more lean to more a Sauvignon Blanc, something that's got some acid they can cut through the richness of Thanksgiving dinner.
35:47.01
Audience
It's about wine. No, I'm kidding. So Matt, we were talking earlier today and you were saying that you recently started an LLM program, just by not having a legal background. So yeah as someone coming from this from an economic background, you're speaking to a room that's 100% full of lawyers. What are your observations about legal education?
36:10.68
Matt Chiasson
I just started the LLM program. I've been working with lawyers for a while. I'm married to a lawyer.
36:18.68
Matt Chiasson
I've learned some things through osmosis, but I've just felt like I needed to get some formal training. I haven't been in a classroom in 16 years and a lot's changed. I was saying earlier that the first question that was asked about the syllabus by a student was, what plagiarism software are you using and what's your tolerance
36:37.07
Matt Chiasson
level. So that was not even a question that you could ask when I was in school. But yeah, so everything is different. There were no, no one had binders. I was the only one with the binder.
36:49.04
Matt Chiasson
Everyone had a laptop, obviously. No, so I think it'll be a good way for me to learn about areas adjacent to competition law, learn about some fundamentals of the law, things that maybe where I have an intuition, but I don't have an actual grounding. Maybe I can actually kind of consolidate things I've learned in a more formal way. So no, it's a challenge, but I'm looking forward to it. Yeah, that's great.
37:16.24
Julia Potter
Well, I think that wraps up our interview. Thank you so much again, Matt, for joining us. It's been a real pleasure. And thank you again to our audience for being here. And we'll keep listening and we'll see you all soon!