Jonathan Hood joins Counterfactual host Julia Potter of Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP to provide insights into his career and role at Competition Bureau Legal Services in this next episode of the “Better Know the Bureau” series.
In this episode, host Julia Potter continues the Better Know the Bureau series with an in‑depth conversation with Jonathan Hood, Senior Counsel at the Department of Justice for Competition Bureau Legal Services (CBLS). Jonathan shares his winding path from private practice to competition enforcement, to leading major litigation files in Canadian competition law.
CBA Counterfactual Podcast – Transcript of Better Know the Bureau Episode: Jonathan Hood (January 19, 2026)
00:00:00
Welcome to Counterfactual, the podcast brought to you by the competition law and foreign investment review section of the Canadian Bar Association. Counterfactual takes a fresh look at issues relevant to business competition and related areas of regulation and explores the real and hypothetical worlds to gain practical insights and debate policy. Hope you enjoy the show.
00:00:29
Julia Potter
Hello, and welcome to Counterfactual, the official podcast of the Canadian Bar Association's Competition Law and Foreign Investment Review section. My name is Julia Potter. I'm a partner in the Competition and Foreign Investment Group at Blake, Cassels and Graydon, and I will be your host for this episode.
00:00:45
Julia Potter
Today, we are continuing on with our next installment of the Better Know the Bureau series, in which we'll be interviewing people within the Competition Bureau, or in this case, Competition Bureau Legal Services, to let us get to know them, their background and their role within the Bureau ecosystem.
00:01:01
Julia Potter
Our guest today is Jonathan Hood, counsel at the Department of Justice for Competition Bureau Legal Services, which is otherwise known as CBLS. And before we start, please note that the views expressed on this podcast are our own, and do not necessarily represent those of the Competition Bureau, Competition Bureau Legal Services, Blakes, or the Canadian Bar Association. Hi, Jonathan. Thank you very much for being on Counterfactual today and sharing some information about you and your role at CBLS with our listeners.
00:01:32
Jonathan Hood
Thank you for having me.
00:01:33
Julia Potter
We can jump right in getting started with the CBLS. You were in private practice before moving to the Bureau and then to CBLS. Can you tell us a bit about that journey and the decisions that brought you into your current role?
00:01:47
Jonathan Hood
Sure. I'm going to let you in on a closely held secret. When I was young, I was bitten by a radioactive spider, one with a deep and abiding interest in competition law. No, sorry, that can't be right. Wrong origin story. Let me try that again. I certainly did not head to law school with the goal of becoming a competition litigator. I'd never heard of competition law until I got to law school.
00:02:13.75
Jonathan Hood
I went to law school because I realized that slinging magazines at Chapters, which is what I did for a year after I finished undergrad, was not a recipe for a long and satisfying career. But when I got to law school, I had in mind maybe litigation, maybe corporate work. I had enjoyed science and technology, but I didn't have the marks to be an engineer. So, I thought you know maybe patent law.
00:02:34
Jonathan Hood
I took patent law. It was so boring. But I took competition law and I enjoyed it. I got a job as a summer student after my second year at McMillan. I articled with them, and they actually hired me back as a corporate lawyer.
00:02:49.10
Jonathan Hood
Now, I can't exactly remember the timing of how this all worked out, but sometime when I was articling, a lawyer, his name was Bill Hearn, walked into my office and said, “I've got a bunch of farmers, corn farmers in my office, and they're concerned about dumped and subsidized grain corn from the US. Do you know anything about trade law? Would you be interested in coming to meet them?”
00:03:12
Jonathan Hood
As it happened, when I was between first and second year of law school, I'd studied international trade law in England at a castle called Herstmonceux. It was owned by Queen's University. It was a very fun way, by the way, to spend the summer, because in addition to living at a castle, you go to Europe on the weekends and visit all sorts of swanky places.
00:03:35
Jonathan Hood
Anyways, I thought trade law was interesting, and so I jumped at the opportunity. I did not realize what I was signing up for, but that file grew steadily in importance over articling. There were a number of things we were doing for the farmers, but the most important was to try and get anti-dumping and countervailing duties imposed on US grain corn.
00:03:56
Jonathan Hood
After I was called to the bar, when I started back at McMillan for the first two years of my practice, basically all I did was this file, which is basically a litigation file, even though I was supposed to be doing corporate work.
00:04:08
Jonathan Hood
I'm going to sort of gloss over and simplify a bit how these cases work. But first, you have to prove the products are being dumped or subsidized through submissions to the CBSA. If the CBSA agrees with you, they'll set preliminary anti-dumping and countervailing duties.
00:04:24
Jonathan Hood
And after that, you have to go to the to the Canadian International Trade Tribunal and prove that without the duties, the industry is going to be injured. And in many respects, trade law is the flip of competition law, right? Dumping is just predatory pricing, essentially.
00:04:40
Jonathan Hood
We convinced the CBSA that US grain corn is dumped and subsidized, so much that people who use grain corn in Canada stood up and took notice. If you know nothing about corn, you might just think about the corn you eat at dinner.
00:04:57
Jonathan Hood
That is such a small slice of the corn world. To give some context, if there are 30,000 products in a supermarket, 10,000 of those probably have something to do with corn.
00:05:08
Jonathan Hood
If we were successful at proving injury, the price of corn would go up in Canada, so a few people showed up to oppose us at the CITT.
00:05:17
Jonathan Hood
These were all parties opposed to what we were doing, and they all had their own counsel. Some of them had multiple counsel. They all showed up at the hearing and obviously the hearing room could not accommodate all of them, so there was an overflow into a second room.
00:05:36
Jonathan Hood
We did the injury hearing, which was up to that point in time of my life, I think the most intense experience I'd ever been through. It was full-on litigation. I think there were 30 witnesses with all the work that goes along with it. It was crazy.
00:05:51
Jonathan Hood
And we lost. I was devastated, but as I started to learn, and as I always say now, litigation is wildly unpredictable. If at the end you've left it all out in the field, then the result's going to be what it is.
00:06:05
Jonathan Hood
We did appeal, and I actually thought we had a strong appeal, but Chief Justice Richard, who heard the appeal, did not. Marcus Conan, who's now Justice Conan, put up a valiant fight, but Chief Justice Richard ruled against us from the bench.
00:06:21
Jonathan Hood
After that happened, I thought, boy, I never want to be on the receiving end of a decision from the bench again. Little did I know what my career had in store for me.
00:06:31
Jonathan Hood
At that point in time, two years had passed since I started practice, and McMillan said to me, “It probably doesn't make sense for you to be a corporate lawyer anymore. You should come be a litigator.” And I did.
00:06:43
Jonathan Hood
Though I still sat with the competition group as well. Over the next three years, I did all sorts of litigation in all sorts of areas, employment law, product liability, contracts, and from time to time, competition law cases.
00:06:59
Jonathan Hood
Though there were not a lot of litigation opportunities in competition law. I remember one morning a lawyer whose name was Martin Low walked into my office and said, Jonathan, the Bureau has a warrant against Hershey. They're right there now searching their offices. Grab your computer. Let's go.
00:07:17
Jonathan Hood
So I spent the next week living at Hershey while the Bureau executed its search warrant, looking into whether there was a conspiracy to fix chocolate prices.
00:07:28
Jonathan Hood
Many crazy, like, war stories from that. I know this is a podcast. I will describe what I'm about to hold up, but this is the editorial from the Toronto Star with the caption reading the evil within the so-called chocolate cartel.
00:07:41
Jonathan Hood
In the editorial were pictures of M&Ms and fatigues holding guns and a bunny chomping on cigars. It was very, very amusing, but for the purposes of our conversation, there are two things that stuck out in my mind about that case.
00:07:56
Jonathan Hood
First, I remember we would get these elaborate catered lunches and it was Hershey's. We had baskets of all types of candies sold and stuff that they were experimenting on.
00:08:09
Jonathan Hood
It was a really cool office. They had couches in the shape of red licorice, for example. And conversely, I remember that most of the Bureau officers usually came with a bagged lunch from home.
00:08:19
Jonathan Hood
The second thing I remember from that case is I wanted to be doing what the Bureau officers were doing. This was usually always the case when I did a competition case. I did a few merger reviews along the way and I like the idea, I know it sounds crazy and corny, but I like doing work that helps society. McMillan was a great place to work, don't get me wrong. There are days when I might not have felt sort of good about what I was doing. I love the corn file I told you about because at the end of the day, I thought it was unfair that Canadian farmers were competing against US farmers who received billions of dollars from the government.
00:08:58
Jonathan Hood
But most of the work you do on Bay Street, you're advancing corporate interests, which is fine. It's important work. It's just not what I enjoy doing.
00:09:09
Jonathan Hood
Exactly. Like if companies merge, they're merging because they think they can make more money than if they did not merge. And there's only one of two ways that can be the case. First is if the merger generates efficiencies and only if those efficiencies lower variable costs, and so it’s possible consumers might see similar prices in that situation. But my experience seeing those types of mergers is akin to spotting a unicorn. The second way a merging company can make money is by increasing prices to its customers because they've just eliminated a competitor.
00:09:41
Jonathan Hood
So, I knew I'd want to go to the Bureau. The other about when you're in private practice and you're doing these things, you're only seeing a small part of the picture, right? You see what your client tells you, but you don't get to see everything. The Bureau gets to investigate, and they get to investigate whether a particular merger is bad or whether conduct is causing harm. And they're investigating to find out the right answer. They don't assume the answer to begin with.
00:10:11
Jonathan Hood
So I always thought it would be really cool to go work for the Bureau. But at the time, I guess probably still today, the Bureau had a very small presence in Toronto. If you wanted to join, the easiest way was to move to Ottawa. And I'm very, very firmly rooted in Toronto, so that was not going to happen.
00:10:30
Jonathan Hood
Except when I've been practicing, now for about five years, a mergers officer in Toronto, her name was Serena Sam, she got pregnant with triplets. They needed someone to fill in for her while she was on mat leave, so I applied and I got the job.
00:10:48
Jonathan Hood
It was August, I think around 2010. I go over to the Bureau, and I know you can ask me a question about this later, but I go over as an officer, not as a lawyer, as a CO2.
00:10:59
Jonathan Hood
Now, what I'm about to tell you would never happen these days. Mergers does a fantastic job of onboarding new hires. But back when I joined in 2010, my first day of work, it was, “here's your cubicle”. And I kid you not, the computer systems were down for the first two or three days. So, they said, “Here's a copy of the MEGs. Why don't you go read them?” I went home to my wife and said, “my god, what have I done?”
00:11:25
Jonathan Hood
A few days later, I get assigned to work on a non-notifiable merger. The lead officer who was on this merger, he was in Ottawa, so he gives me a call. He told me it would be great experience because non-notifiables never go anywhere.
00:11:41
Jonathan Hood
He said, “So we're going to work. Just start setting up market calls.” I said, “Great. How do I do that?” Anyways, the merger is now known to anyone who I imagine listens to this podcast as Tervita.
00:11:57
Jonathan Hood
That fall, 2010, I'm doing the investigation into this merger about the acquisition of a secure landfill that accepts hazardous oil and gas waste in northeastern British Columbia.
00:12:08
Jonathan Hood
I eventually figure out how to do market contacts. I'm leading them and the oil and gas companies seem pretty concerned. It was a non-notifiable, but both parties responded to a voluntary RFI.
00:12:20
Jonathan Hood
I swear the second or third document I looked at, it was a CCS email. CCS eventually changes its name to Tervita, and this is all part of the public record. Anyways, the third document I pull up is basically CCS saying we need to buy Babkirk. Otherwise, the company is going to open up the landfill and there's going to be a price war.
00:12:39
Jonathan Hood
And the next 10 documents I looked at were equally helpful. I remember going into my first briefing with management with a fellow, Steve Peters, who was the CO4 at the time. He said to me, “Jonathan, officers can go years investigating mergers without coming across something that is this problematic. And certainly not one where the evidence just falls into your lap.”
00:13:00
Jonathan Hood
So, I'm obviously not spoiling anything by saying that Bureau decided to challenge that merger. Now, if you pull the notice of application, you'll not see my name anywhere on the pleadings, but I held the pen on that until the very end. I think we filed around January 2011.
00:13:18
Jonathan Hood
By this time, I guess the Bureau was relatively happy with my work and they asked me what I wanted to do, and the answer was I wanted to litigate Tervita. They had in their mind that it would be good to have a CBLS lawyer in Toronto.
00:13:32
Jonathan Hood
The Bureau seconded me to the Department of Justice so I could help litigate Tervita, so over I go around February 2011. Now, a few things to keep in mind as this is going down. This is the first merger challenge in a decade at the Bureau. It was the first non-notifiable to ever be challenged. And it was the first challenge to be based solely on a prevention of competition theory of harm.
00:13:55
Julia Potter
It's probably a good one with your very first case, why not?
00:13:59
Jonathan Hood
Right well, and I'm six years out, right? I've litigated enough that I'm comfortable with the litigation process, but certainly I've done nothing with the exception of the CITT case.
00:14:09
Jonathan Hood
Well, I've done nothing in front of the Competition Tribunal, nothing sort of this size and scope. And there was a lawyer on interchange at the time, his name is Niki Iatrou, you probably know.
00:14:19
Jonathan Hood
He was also around my year of call and somehow Niki managed to convince Melanie, who was the Commissioner at the time, to let us litigate the case.
00:14:27
Jonathan Hood
Niki took the lead, but I was involved in all aspects of the application. I held the pen on the pleadings. I led some of the discoveries. I was responsible for getting the witness statements ready for a number of our chief witnesses. And at the hearing, which was over four weeks in Vancouver and Ottawa, I was responsible for issues related to barriers to entry and efficiencies.
00:14:50
Jonathan Hood
Efficiencies, ostensibly, and everyone listening will appreciate the irony of this, because this was not an efficiencies case. At the hearing, I conducted multiple examinations in chief, cross-examinations of fact witnesses. I crossed Tervita’s industry expert and their economic expert on efficiencies. I helped draft the written argument and I argued barriers and efficiencies in front of the Tribunal. And again, I'm just six years out and I got to do all this.
00:15:20
Jonathan Hood
Litigating is grueling, but wow, like what a cool experience. And we won. Now, CCS, now known as Tervita, appeals to the Federal Court of Appeal, and we win that as well.
00:15:32
Jonathan Hood
Tervita seeks leave to go to the Supreme Court of Canada, and they get leave. By this time, Niki has gone back to private practice, and justice is very protective of who can appear at the Supreme Court of Canada on behalf of the Government of Canada. They have to be in a specialized group.
00:15:48
Jonathan Hood
They don't let you appear, even if you're not going to say anything. But in this instance, and it required special approval, I was actually allowed to appear at the Supreme Court, to be clear, not to argue.
00:15:58
Jonathan Hood
I could be there just to give information to John Ty Harris and Chris Ruppart if they needed it to answer a question. Anyways, we all know what Justice Rothstein did on Tervita. Essentially, Tervita gets to maintain its monopoly in northeastern British Columbia because it saved Canada something like half the salary of a clerk.
00:16:17
Jonathan Hood
At some point in time during that wild ride, I went from being seconded to the Department of Justice to actually being moved there permanently. So that's my origin story. No radioactive spider, though I believe the Babkirk facility may have been permitted to accept NORMs, which stands for naturally occurring radioactive materials, so there was some radioactivity.
00:16:37
Julia Potter
Yeah, it's always very interesting hearing how folks get into this. It certainly was niche back when I started. It's becoming more public, people are more aware of competition laws, and we're seeing that in our recruitment efforts too.
00:16:51
Julia Potter
But it is interesting hearing how everyone found their path, because it is usually winding and starting off one way, and then the shift happens at some point. I think the moral for our young listeners is you don't really know where things are taking you.
00:17:01
Julia Potter
A case will fall on your desk, and they change the trajectory of where you're headed and what you're doing. It's always very interesting.
00:17:08
Jonathan Hood
Completely by chance, I agree with you.
00:17:12
Julia Potter
Next year will mark 15 years at CBLS. How has your role evolved over the past decade and a half?
00:17:20
Jonathan Hood
When I came over in 2011, I came over as what is known as an LP2. It was called a counsel. I'm now an LP3, so technically I'm a senior counsel, but I don't really think about my role evolving in that way.
00:17:34
Jonathan Hood
In my mind, my career at CBLS has gone through a couple of phases. After Tervita, I was hooked. Not everybody at CBLS likes to litigate, but that's all I wanted to do.
00:17:46
Jonathan Hood
I asked to be put on cases either in litigation or they looked like they might go to litigation. From 2012 to 2017, I did a lot of litigation in front of the Tribunal, but none of them ever went the distance, with the exception of one, which I'll tell you about in a moment.
00:18:04
Jonathan Hood
After Tervita, we got a new executive director. Basically, the executive director is the person who runs CBLS. His name was David Wingfield, and he was a litigator. He was recruited with the idea that he was going to start to build out CBLS's ability to litigate. At the time, the Bureau would agent out a lot of its files if it was thinking about litigating. In other words, they would retain a private law firm to represent it.
00:18:29
Jonathan Hood
But they started to think about being able to bring these back in house because it's, with all due respect, more efficient to pay a government lawyer to litigate than it is to pay Bay Street lawyer to litigate these cases.
00:18:41
Jonathan Hood
After Tervita, the Bureau challenged a joint venture between Air Canada and United Continental. Initially there was an agent on that file for the Commissioner, but it was decided with David there, we could litigate this internally. So it was brought back in. David was a fantastic litigator, but he had to run CBLS, so he couldn't really be involved in the day-to-day writing of the file. So I put my hand up.
00:19:04
Jonathan Hood
Internally I was driving the bus, so to speak. I had David there to give me advice when I needed guidance, but I was doing all the in the trenches heavy lifting work. I went to sit with the Commissioner's discovery during our SIR representative on discovery. When we did the refusals motion, I argued that. Air Canada was settled and then I was assigned to my first MPD case against Reliance and Direct Energy. Those are companies that if you live in Ontario and you own a house, odds are you rent the water heater from one of those two. The allegation was that if you wanted to return your water heater, they made it very difficult.
00:19:41
Jonathan Hood
I got assigned to that file just after the notice of application had been filed and Reliance had brought a pleadings motion. They'd lost an appeal to the FCA. My first job on that file was to argue an appeal.
00:19:56
Jonathan Hood
At some point in time, David finishes his interchange, and I basically have to lead the file. And those were massive files, like huge documentary discovery and all the issues that arose from that. During that time as well, I think I was also doing a lot of mergers review work, including a number where we went to get Section 11 orders to examine parties.
00:20:25
Jonathan Hood
So I had litigation adjacent work. I had a DMP case, Deceptive Marketing Practices case involving a company called Moose Knuckles, where we filed an application on the Tribunal alleging that Moose Knuckles claimed they made the jackets in Canada and the fact they were made elsewhere, so we said that was false or misleading.
00:20:45
Jonathan Hood
Then Staples tried to acquire Office Depot. I think this was probably for the second time, and this one we concluded was problematic.
00:20:56
Jonathan Hood
It was being reviewed by the US, obviously, at the same time by the FTC, and we worked very closely with them. The Commissioner decided to challenge, and it was interesting because we coordinated. For the first time, I filed our application with the Competition Tribunal the same day the FTC filed for a preliminary injunction in the D.C. District Court.
00:21:18
Jonathan Hood
We realized that the file would likely be decided down in the US. Because we'd been working closely with the FTC, it was decided that I would be seconded down to the FTC so I could help out with their efforts to attain the injunction.
00:21:32
Jonathan Hood
While Bureau officers have been seconded down to the FTC, no one from CBLS had ever been seconded. Jonathan Chaplin, who was the executive director, moved heaven and earth to get me down there in record time.
00:21:45
Jonathan Hood
This is around 2016. I went down from March to the end of May and holy smokes, what an amazing experience. I got an apartment a block and a half behind the US Supreme Court on Capitol Hill. Same bike share system like we have in Toronto. I would jump on a bike, bike past the US Supreme Court, down past Capitol Hill, park in front of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and then walk into the FTC offices.
00:22:11
Julia Potter
Very cool. Yeah.
00:22:13
Jonathan Hood
Yeah. So I started to dive in. I mean, objectively, we know how large the US and the resources they can bring to bear on a case are.
00:22:25
Jonathan Hood
Just to put it in perspective, in Canada, on Staples Office Depot, I was the only CBLS lawyer, and there were two or three officers. That was it. I go down to the FTC, and I still have the trial team list as a memento on my wall. Again, I'll describe it for you. This is what is like the trial team list. There are 50 staff attorneys on that list.
00:22:49
Jonathan Hood
And they were they were involved in every aspect of that case. I think they assembled something like 35 witnesses, not to mention all the experts. And each witness had its own team of staff attorneys responsible for that witness.
00:23:04
Julia Potter
Yeah, lots more. It is a very different process to manage that scale or size.
00:23:10
Jonathan Hood
I know. Obviously I couldn't argue in court down there, but I would help prepare the cross-examinations. Carl Shapiro was their economics expert, so I got to work with a team working with him to get ready. But I had a front row seat in court to watch this all go down.
00:23:26
Jonathan Hood
It was wild. Staples and Office Depot, when they opened, they used a PowerPoint presentation I would never dream of using in Canada. They had taken a picture of the statue in front of the FTC headquarters.
00:23:39
Jonathan Hood
I don't know if you've seen it. It's like a wild, wild horse. They photoshop blinders over it to indicate that the FTC wasn't assessing this reasonably. There's one side which was a picture of a graveyard.
00:23:53
Jonathan Hood
And they had put the names of dead companies on the tombstones. So it’s a picture, like you would never do this in Canada. During the hearing, Amazon was one of the FTC witnesses. Staples argued that FTC was trying to get Amazon to perjure itself. This was in the Wall Street Journal the next day, headlines like “FTC accused of having Amazon witness perjury itself”. It was wild.
00:24:21
Jonathan Hood
Anyways, the FTC won. Staples abandoned its merger with Office Depot and I come back to Canada. When I said my career is in phases, that was sort of the end of the first phase of my career.
00:24:36
Jonathan Hood
I'd started with a big bang on Tervita, but then over the next five years, I did lots of litigation, but none of them ever went to the distance of the Tribunal.
00:24:46
Jonathan Hood
Since I got back from Washington, I've been leading litigation after litigation. While I had previously been driving the bus, the bus never arrived at the destination, and I had someone usually telling me where to go. After I got back from Washington, I was assigned to the Vancouver Airport Authority investigation, and we filed the notice of application. That one goes the distance. It was very hard fought, notable for many reasons, including the fact that it featured the demise of public interest privilege as a class-based privilege. And when the dust was settled, we lost.
00:25:23
Jonathan Hood
But we pushed the boundaries, and I think we got valuable jurisprudence in the process. After that came Parrish & Heimbecker. Parrish and Heimbecker acquired 10 grain elevators from Louis Dreyfus. We alleged that the acquisition of one grain elevator in Virden, Manitoba caused a substantial lessening of competition because it was just down the road on the Trans-Canada Highway from another elevator in Moosomin, Saskatchewan.
00:25:51
Jonathan Hood
This case went down over COVID, so it was the first hearing to be done virtually in front of the Tribunal. We lost that one as well, like really lost.
00:26:02
Jonathan Hood
In the Tribunal decision summary, there's a paragraph and a sentence where the Tribunal says the Commissioner's case was wrong in fact, wrong in economics, and wrong in law. And yet, that case was not quite the face plant that that paragraph would suggest.
00:26:18
Jonathan Hood
First of all, it took the Tribunal 18 months to write that decision. When you read the decision, you can tell they're wrestling with it a lot. It’s 801 paragraphs. This was not a clear-cut case. At the end, it ordered a cost award less than what P&H was seeking.
00:26:32
Jonathan Hood
So it couldn't have been that bad. And again, importantly, we get valuable jurisprudence to think about how, for example, we might think about value added markets. The Parrish hearing finished at the beginning of February, 2021.
00:26:49
Jonathan Hood
Then one month later, the Bureau was notified that Secure was buying Tervita. A few things. First, there is a really compelling made-for-TV movie in what I'm about to tell you.
00:27:03
Jonathan Hood
Recall my first case was Tervita, and it was not notifiable, but it was brought to our attention by one of Tervita's competitors called Secure. Secure was started by Rene Amirault and a few other Tervita executives. Tervita was not happy. They sued Secure, a massive piece of litigation.
00:27:22
Jonathan Hood
As you know, we lost Tervita. Sometime after, I forget exactly when, Tervita bought its number two competitor in the Western Canadian sedimentary basin called Newalta.
00:27:33
Jonathan Hood
That merger was reviewed, but we didn't challenge it. It’snow big enough that he engineers a takeover of Tervita.
00:27:41
Jonathan Hood
It’s wild. We get notified and we knew right away that the merger was going to be problematic. There’s not going to be anybody left of substance in Western Canada.
00:27:52
Jonathan Hood
The Bureau had a litigation battle-tested team from P&H, and they literally picked us up and put us on the Secure case.
00:28:03
Jonathan Hood
Right away, we start to get ready for litigation. I think we had the notice of application drafted before the first 30 days were up. Secure and Tervita responded to the SIRs in almost record time, and we can tell that they're going to close. We start to get our injunction materials ready. The closing is set for July 2nd.
00:28:24
Jonathan Hood
We file our notice of application and an application for an injunction under 104, and it's supported by a massive affidavit. I think there's a thousand pages of evidence we put in. The only reason we can do this is because it's our third investigation in the industry. We were pretty familiar with it. We file our injunction and we ask Secure and Tervita not to close the merger until that 104 injunction can be heard.
00:28:47
Jonathan Hood
They decline, so we bring an emergency request for an interim interim injunction, as we called it, until the 104 injunction can be heard. Chief Justice Crampton hears that on June 30th, 2021.
00:29:00
Jonathan Hood
Recall the merger is scheduled to close July 2nd at 2 a.m. in the morning. July 1st rolls around, Canada Day. Nothing yet from Chief Justice Crampton. We're reasonably certain he's going to rule against us, but I don't have an order yet. I have no way of getting in front of the FCA. Just in case though, we're frantically getting our materials ready for an emergency appeal request.
00:29:21
Jonathan Hood
Around the end of the day with no decision yet, we decide we're going to prepare and file a judicial review because I don't have a decision. We file that at 10:35pm on Canada Day with the Federal Court of Appeal.
00:29:35
Jonathan Hood
15 minutes later, 10:50pm, Chief Justice Crampton issues his reasons and, as expected, we lost, so we immediately filed the request for the emergency appeal, and I think that goes in around 11pm at night. We had opened up communications with the FCA to alert them that we might need a judge, but nothing had happened, and obviously by dinner time they probably didn't think anything was going to happen anyways. After 11 pm, I called the duty officer, who told me he couldn't find anyone to hear the appeal. He asked me, why can't we just do this tomorrow? The answer, of course, was because by tomorrow, the merger was going to be done.
00:30:13
Jonathan Hood
I said “I keep my phone with me”, but he didn't think he wasn't optimistic about finding anybody. By this time, you have to appreciate it, we've been going flat out for a month to get all this ready. We're all exhausted.
00:30:27
Jonathan Hood
11:30, still nothing from the FCA. We're still working from home at this point. So I get up, I go home, I go to get ready for bed. I'm literally crawling into bed and I get a phone call from the duty officer literally at midnight. He's found Justice Stratus who is going to start the appeal in 20 minutes. So I get out of bed, put my suit back on, go down to the basement.
00:30:48
Jonathan Hood
Justice Stratus convenes the appeal and we have our appeal. By that time, I'm so exhausted. I can barely string two words together. But I argue and Secure argues and we go until 1:30am in the morning.
00:31:01
Jonathan Hood
At 1:45am on July 2nd, he dismisses our appeal with reasons to follow, and Secure closes the merger 15 minutes later at 2am. So as I said, there's a compelling made-for-TV movie in there, Julia.
00:31:15
Jonathan Hood
So my only question for you is, to put you on the spot, who do you think should play me?
00:31:21
Julia Potter
I'll say maybe it could be a one-man show like the Rogers v Rogers and we could get someone to play everybody really.
00:31:27
Jonathan Hood
Well, I'm glad you brought that up, because if – Have you seen Rogers vs. Rogers?
00:31:30
Julia Potter
I haven’t. I hear it's coming back. So hopefully I’ll see it on its next go round.
00:31:35
Jonathan Hood
It is. It is fantastic, but what I just described for you is actually featured in Rogers vs. Rogers
00:31:40
Jonathan Hood
At the beginning, when the character is playing the Commissioner, he's lamenting that a merger has never been successfully challenged in Canada, and he goes on to say this case, he's like, I just tried to pause a merger, and I couldn't.
00:31:51
Jonathan Hood
Anyway, that was a very exciting start to the case, but we still have to litigate. Chief Justice Crampton eventually hears the 104 injunction. We lose, but we keep going on the merits.
00:32:02
Jonathan Hood
Now, Secure is orders of magnitude more complicated than Parrish and Heimbecker. That involved one grain elevator. Secure, we allege there were 143 distinct markets in Canada where Secure had caused a substantial lessening of competition, and we wanted divestiture of 41 facilities to remedy that.
00:32:18
Jonathan Hood
To support our case in chief, I think we filed over 30 witness statements along with the usual expert reports. That hearing was done virtually again. It was four weeks of evidence and two weeks of final argument, and we finished basically end of June 2022. So I catch my breath for the next few months while we wait for that decision.
00:32:37
Jonathan Hood
Now, at the same time, the Bureau was notified about Secure and Tervita in March 2021. The Bureau was also notified about Rogers and Shaw. Now, Secure was a big deal for me. It consumed my life for years, but we actually flew under the radar, sort of both internally at the Bureau and externally, because everyone was rightly paying attention to what was happening with Rogers and Shaw.
00:32:59
Jonathan Hood
It took all the pressure off the Secure team. It was great. But Rogers and Shaw became a beast internally at CBLS. Because I was gainfully employed on Secure, I think I was literally the only one at CBLS that had absolutely nothing to do with Rogers and Shaw as it worked its way through the Tribunal process.
00:33:17
Jonathan Hood
So I finished Secure, I need a few months to catch my breath, and because everybody's focused on Rogers, there was lots of other work that needed to be done to help keep me busy. Again, Secure starts at the same time as Rogers and Shaw. Secure is done by mid-June 2022. We haven't heard back from the Tribunal. Rogers and Shaw starts November 7th and finishes December 14th.
00:33:40
Jonathan Hood
The team has worked harder than I think it's possible to imagine. They're completely tapped out. And because the merger has to close before our New Year's, and I think we were all reading the way Justice Crampton was leading, the Bureau starts to think about the inevitable appeal. Because the case team is spent, I get assigned to help out on the appeal.
00:34:01
Jonathan Hood
Chief Justice Crampton issues his decision on December 29th and the Tribunal is allowing the merger. That's 15 days after the hearing is finished, right? It took the tribunal 18 months to decide P&H and Secure, we still didn't have a decision. Like, Rogers Shaw was leapfrogging us.
00:34:21
Jonathan Hood
Anyways, I thought at the time, what went down over Canada Day was stressful. The Rogers and Shaw appeal was like a whole other level. I showed up just to argue the schedule for the appeal in front of Justice Stratus again.
00:34:35
Jonathan Hood
This time, I'm quoted in the paper in a motion to argue a schedule. The appeal gets set for January 24th. I've basically been living in Ottawa since before Christmas. We kill ourselves to get ready for January 24th. It rolls around and I'm doing it. Alex Gay is the lead on it. We've split the grounds of appeal.
00:34:55
Jonathan Hood
Alex starts and you can tell right away how the appeal is going to go. By the time I stand up to make my submissions, like the FCA is silent, not asking questions anymore. We have a break for lunch, and the clerk comes back at the end of lunch and says the court needs more time. And as I learned from my first experience way back on the corn file, when that happens, it means yes, we were going to be rolled on the bench. And we were again, sort of the second time in my career, from Justice Stratus.
00:35:22
Jonathan Hood
Next day, there was an article in the Globe. If you look in the original print edition, that picture is of the Davies lawyers, but the caption read, Jonathan Hood, center left.
00:35:34
Jonathan Hood
And the lawyer for the Competition Bureau leaves the Federal Court of Appeal. And a person in the picture who they said was me was Derek Ricci, so I got to write him a funny email the next day, joking that I never looked so good.
00:35:45
Jonathan Hood
So Rogers and Shaw was like a fun little detour. I also think it was around this time I was asked to give a presentation, and when I was asked for a biography, because I sort of half-jokingly said I could be introduced as Canada's most unsuccessful competition law litigator because I'd never won anything. Anyways, we got the decision on Secure March 2023. The Tribunal agreed that Secure caused an SLC in 136 of the 143 markets that we alleged, and they ordered divestiture of 29 of the 41 facilities.
00:36:18
Jonathan Hood
Secure, of course, appealed. We argued that June 2023, and we won the appeal. After that, I basically rolled right into Cineplex. We did that case pretty fast.
00:36:30
Jonathan Hood
We filed our application May 2023, we argued that hearing February 2024, and we got the reasons September 2024. At the tribunal we won but Cineplex appealed.
00:36:41
Jonathan Hood
We argued that appeal early in the fall last year, and we don't have a decision. And as experience has taught me, these things are not over until the Supreme Court tells you otherwise.
00:36:53
Jonathan Hood
So, it's to be determined what happens with Cineplex. After Cineplex, I was put on a misleading advertising case against Rogers related to advertisements of their cell phone plans.
00:37:06
Jonathan Hood
Our notice of application on that was filed December 2024, and we filed our case in chief last week. Somewhere in there, I was also assigned to Wonderland, and that application was filed in May. So the second part of my career, it was fun for me to recount the details. I don't know if anybody else will find it interesting, but since I got back from the US, it's just been consistently litigating files to completion one after the other.
00:37:33
Julia Potter
It's quite different than the previous sets where you were litigating for almost the first time in a while. Now it's more common at least. Speaking about today, can you describe your current role and what your day-to-day looks like and maybe a bit about what your primary focus is?
00:37:54
Jonathan Hood
Yeah, so my role depends on the stage of the file. Like I said, it's always been the case I want to litigate, so I get assigned files where there's a real possibility of litigation.
00:38:06
Jonathan Hood
If I show up on a file, it's probably not the best sign your file is headed in the right direction. But if I'm assigned before litigation starts, at this point in time, the file is still very much in the case team's hands. My role at that stage, sort of depends on the stage of the file and the composition of the case teams. If it's really early, I actually enjoy sitting in and listening in on market contacts.
00:38:33
Jonathan Hood
But it's the case team that's doing all the investigative work. If the case team you know wants to attend a section 11 order, for example, then that responsibility lies very much with CBLS.
00:38:44
Jonathan Hood
If it looks like the file is getting close to litigation, I might start to draft the notice of application based on the team's theory of harm so we can see what it looks like. I'll look and start assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the evidence that's been collected.
00:38:58
Jonathan Hood
As we get close, if the case team views there's a case and the Commissioner should bring one, then I'll usually prepare a litigation risk assessment. Now, because filing an application isn't something you just do on a whim, as Boromir says, “one does not simply walk into Mordor” and you simply do not file an application with the Tribunal casually either. At that stage, you're talking about thousands of hours of work by the case officers usually. But once the Commissioner signs off and we file the application, there's a shift in the responsibilities. The file moves from the case team to CBLS, and at that point in time, CBLS is more in the driver's seat. Now, just because responsibility shifts doesn't mean the case team is done right there. They're absolutely central and pivotal to the litigation. They are masters of the evidence, and they help us marshal that evidence. But at that point in time, we're litigating, so that falls to the lawyers to do the usual litigation tasks, drafting up the reply, agreeing on a schedule, negotiating the confidentiality order, then going through the documentary discovery process, which can be its own type of hell given the Bureau's antiquated systems. Then on discovery, just to give you an example of the split between CBLS and the case team, the case team will have identified a lot of the interesting and important documents. They might even suggest the questions, but we'll take that information and do the discoveries. After discoveries, you drive towards filing a case in chief and then riding the rapids of litigation to the end.
00:40:34
Jonathan Hood
Working with the team to file reply evidence, drafting the opening statement, preparing your witnesses for examination in chief, then drafting the final argument, and then doing the final argument, then collapsing in exhaustion and waiting for the Tribunal decision. They’re massive team efforts. You'll have the case team, and then I'll have other CBLS lawyers. We’ll have usually economists and other internal resources, so a lot of it is case management to make sure that all that stuff happens when it's supposed to happen. After it's done, if we lose, we’ll look and I'll draft an appeal or no appeal recommendation letter, and if we win then we will wait inevitably for the notice of appeal, and then obviously we run the appeal.
00:41:26
Julia Potter
Yeah, that's very interesting. You’ve already spoken a little bit about the difference between the case officers and your role at CBLS. But just in case some of our listeners aren't fully up to speed on the differences between the Bureau versus CBLS, can you just give us a bit of an explanation on how each role plays with the organization, how they interact?
00:41:46
Julia Potter
Of course, you've been on both sides. You've been a case officer as well as, or at least on the Bureau side, as well as a CBLS, and what your experiences have been on both sides.
00:41:46
Jonathan Hood
For sure. I can understand sometimes why my people might get confused, because to be a competition law officer at the Bureau, you either have to be a lawyer or an economist.
00:42:05
Jonathan Hood
But CBLS and the Bureau, they're very closely connected, but they're two separate institutions. At a high level, the Competition Bureau is the organization that is tasked with assisting the Commissioner of Competition, who's responsible for enforcing the Competition Act. It's a law enforcement agency, so it's staffed with individuals who I colloquially call them like they're the competition law cops. They are the cops for competition law. They investigate criminal conduct. They have the same tools to do those investigations as cops do, more actually because we have Section 11 orders sometimes. They can get search warrants.
00:42:43
Jonathan Hood
So, as I said, to be a competition law officer, you have to have a law degree or a degree in economics, but you're not actually practicing as a lawyer. You're an investigator. You investigate mergers, if you're in the mergers directorate. You investigate abuse of dominance, if you're in the monopolistic practices directorate. And cartels, you're in the criminal division.
00:43:05
Jonathan Hood
A file will come in and it's the Bureau's job to find the facts and determine whether those facts show that the law has been breached and whether enforcement is justified.
00:43:18
Jonathan Hood
CBLS, Competition Bureau Legal Services, is a specialized group within the Department of Justice. So, I'm not actually an employee of the Bureau. I am an employee of the Department of Justice. We are the Commissioner's lawyers. On the civil side, the Commissioner can't file his own applications. He needs to be represented by lawyers.
00:43:36
Jonathan Hood
Once we're assigned, it's basically no different than in private practice of a lawyer being retained by a client. Our job isn't to investigate or decide what to investigate. We're there to provide legal advice to the teams on the civil side and litigate once the Commissioner decides enforcement is warranted. Importantly, most people know this, but I'll say it anyways, on the civil side, it's the Commissioner who provides instructions to CBLS and maintains carriage of the file. On the criminal side, all the Commissioner can do is recommend to the PPSC that charges be filed, and it's the PPSC that makes the decision to prosecute, and if they prosecute, it’s the PPSC that has carriage of it.
00:44:21
Jonathan Hood
Another way to think about the relationship between the Bureau and CBLS is it's almost like a relay race. The Bureau runs the first leg, they gather the evidence, they interview market participants, analyze the documents, develop the theory of harm. Once the Commissioner authorizes litigation, the baton comes to us and we lead the case in court, basically trying to translate what they've done into a legally persuasive case.
00:45:46
Jonathan Hood
At the beginning you said I've done both jobs, and you're right. Admittedly, I was not a competition law officer for very long, but there are different skill sets, and it just depends on what you like, right. Being an investigator, you need to be curious, you need to have an open mind. You have to enjoy obtaining and analyzing piles of evidence.
00:45:05
Jonathan Hood
Most of your job is doing market contacts and analyzing documents, and if you're curious, that can be a lot of fun. The other thing just to emphasize is, despite the different roles, we work really, really closely together. Especially, you go through litigation and it has ways of forging real bonds. You're in the middle of a case, you're in the trenches together, days on end, high stakes, constant pressure. You spend enormous amounts of time relying on each other and each other's judgment. You come to trust each other pretty closely. Some of the Bureau officers I've litigated with are not just colleagues, they've become close friends because of what we've been through together.
00:45:56
Julia Potter
Yeah, so I'd say not so dissimilar on the private practice side. You spend a lot of time with folks and you spend a lot of time at weird hours of the night together and you become quite close over it.
00:46:08
Julia Potter
Speaking of the private practice, you do have quite a bit of exposure to lawyers on the private practice side and a lot of them are our listeners. I was wondering if you have any recommendations for our private practice listeners who are engaging with the Bureau, but really CBLS…
00:46:24
Julia Potter
…in order to make those interactions more positive or more constructive. From your perspective, what do private practitioners do that's particularly helpful or what guidance would you give?
00:46:37
Jonathan Hood
That's a great question. I'm going to answer that question by using Adam Fanaki as an example. There's a reason why it's called the Fanaki moot. My first experience with Adam was when I was going to go to the Bureau. I went to Adam for advice on what I was getting myself into, because he had experience working there.
00:46:56
Jonathan Hood
I basically said, look, I've been hired as a CO2. What does that mean? He took the time to take me to lunch and explain, and he just seemed like a nice guy. Now, my first real professional interaction with him was during the Reliance and Direct Energy litigation I talked about earlier.
00:47:12
Jonathan Hood
He was acting for National Home Services, which was intervening in support of the Commissioner. I really enjoyed working with him, but part of you was wondering whether he was being nice simply because our interests were aligned.
00:47:25
Jonathan Hood
Fast forward to Staples-Office Depot, Adam is now acting for one of the merging parties.We're on opposite sides. He was a fierce advocate for his client, but he treated us exactly the same way he treated us when our interests were aligned: professionally, respectfully, was always constructive. I often tell experts when we retain them and I'm trying to explain what independence and impartiality means, I tell them,
00:47:51
Jonathan Hood
your opinion shouldn't depend on which party retains you. You should give me the same opinion as the other party. That's what I want with you. It’s not a perfect analogy, but Adam was like that as counsel. Whether our interests were aligned or directly opposed, his approach didn't change, and because of that, he was very, very effective, and his clients were well served. Based on my experience from Adam, civility and credibility matter more than I think people realize. At the end of the day, Bureau officers are just doing their job. You guys are doing yours. Being aggressive and dismissive or performatively tough, I don't know, for some people, it might feel like advocacy, but it rarely helps and mostly just aggravates. It certainly never moves the needle in your client's favor.
00:48:45
Jonathan Hood
There's a reason the saying exists, “you catch more flies with honey”. I think Adam completely understood that. He was always respectful. He was always engaged. And he was always persuasive.
00:48:56
Jonathan Hood
Just one more example involving Adam. I was once assigned to an investigation involving one of Adam's clients and another party represented by a different pastry firm.
00:49:06
Jonathan Hood
By the time the meetings were scheduled with the parties, the case team was like fairly confident the investigation was going to be discontinued, and we know they just needed some additional information from the parties, so we went with Adam's client at first, and almost immediately, based on our questions in the meter, Adam picked up on where things were at with the team. He wasn't tough; he was helpful. He said, “Let me help you. I'll work with my client to get you the information you need.” It was a productive, professional meeting, lovely. Second meeting, same investigation, it was like night and day. It felt like walking into the lion's den. We were challenged for even showing up and asking questions. The approach didn't change the outcome in that case, but I just use it to illustrate the fact that Adam's approach was, in my mind, the more effective one for his client. He figured out instinctively what it is that we were trying to do, and he understood the best way to get the result for his clients.
00:50:08
Jonathan Hood
The final thing I would say is, at least this is true of CBLS or the Bureau, your credibility increases when you acknowledge the strengths and weaknesses of your case.
00:50:23
Jonathan Hood
Look, I get it. There's an inclination to fight almost every issue instinctively, regardless of whether it's strong or weak. But we can all take a look at a case and pretty quickly understand where the major issues of contention are. So if you show up with, take an example, a list of supposed effective competitors that's pulled from Google or maybe these days, ChatGPT, and you know that the first five are marginal competitors at best, don't make the case team like chase those five. Say instead, there's two really meaningful competitors and here's why they matter. It’s that kind of candor I think builds trust and makes you more credible and effective with us and with the case team. And that's invaluable.
00:51:19
Julia Potter
Yeah, that's quite helpful. Shifting our attention to a different population of listeners, what advice would you have for competition-minded students or junior associates who are thinking about their career path?
00:51:38
Jonathan Hood
We touched on this sort of at the beginning, be open and be flexible. I like to tell a story about when I was 18. I did a model UN in Ottawa. That was back when we still had grade 13, and the drinking age in Quebec was 18, so naturally, we spent most of our evenings in Hull, as it was then called, on a street, a couple of blocks away from 50 Victoria, which is where the Competition Bureau is.
00:52:04
Jonathan Hood
If you told my 18 year old self, “you see that the building over there, you know beautiful, if you're into 1970s brutalist Soviet architecture, 25 years from now, you are going to spend months on the 21st floor arguing about whether bio-mediation is a viable option for oil and gas companies disposing hazardous waste”, I would have laughed in that person's face. So I think you have to keep an open mind at whatever comes your way and you try it, you see what's interesting.
00:52:40
Jonathan Hood
There's always time to try something different if you're not happy with the way things are going. Be open and be flexible.
00:52:53
Jonathan Hood
If you're born and you're like, “I know I want to be a competition lawyer” from when you were six, then I think the second thing I would say is, and I’m going to make my shameless pitch for CBLS here, come work at CBLS. It's not for everyone. If what you enjoy most is the business of law, like building a book of business, marketing yourself, pitching to clients, making Bay Street money, then CBLS is probably not the right fit for you. But if you love just doing the work, the competition law stuff itself, being on the interesting leading cases, instead of doing yet another merger notification, there is no better place to be than CBLS. I've been here for 15 years. There is not a single private firm I could have gone to that would have given me the same experience I've gotten at CBLS.
00:53:47
Jonathan Hood
In private practice, even if you're very good, whether you get litigation often depends on whether the company under investigation happens to be a client of your firm. It's not true 100% of the time, but a lot of the time that's how those files are litigated in private practice. At CBLS, we get them all because we're the only people who do them.
00:54:09
Jonathan Hood
Another reason why you might want to come to CBLS is you're going to get on your feet far earlier than you ever would at Bay Street. You heard what I was doing like in my sixth year, when I'm leading in cases. Now my younger co-counsels, they get the same thing. They get the chance to do crosses on their first hearings, and the one other thing that I really enjoy about being at CBLS is we have to record our time, but there's no billable hours.
00:54:39
Jonathan Hood
I found it super stressful in private practice where I would sit for like three hours and I come up with a one-page letter I'd look at and go, oh my God, who's going to think I took three hours drafting that? At CBLS...
00:55:52
Jonathan Hood
…you take the time you need to do the job you think you need to do. If I want to practice my submissions three times with people throwing whatever questions they can think to throw at me, nobody's going to blink an eyelash.
00:55:04
Jonathan Hood
I get to do what I think I need to do, and I don't have to worry about billable hours. I don't get paid overtime either, so there's just nothing bothering me to do it. If you're young and you really know you want to do competition law, like I said, CBLS is a pretty cool place to work.
00:55:27
Julia Potter
So if someone was coming to CBLS, what would be the characteristics or qualities that would set them up for success? I think you've touched on a few, but why don't we discuss again?
00:55:37
Jonathan Hood
There are some people who come to CBLS and they pretty quickly decide it's not for them. That’s true both for lawyers joining us from private practice and lawyers coming from other parts of justice.
00:55:49
Jonathan Hood
I think the biggest adjustment is that the client relationship is just fundamentally different. In private practice, even when you're dealing with a sophisticated client or an in-house counsel, you're usually the expert. Your advice carries piles of weight and is usually followed.
00:56:06
Jonathan Hood
In litigation, I think you usually have significant latitude in how to conduct your litigation. At CBLS, the dynamic changes. Your client is the Competition Bureau, and it is without question the most sophisticated, hardworking, and knowledgeable client you will ever have. Bureau officers are subject matter experts in the truest sense. Many of them are lawyers themselves. I've worked with officers who know parts of the jurisprudence better than I do. They'll know the facts of their files like no one else's business.
00:56:37
Jonathan Hood
It means taking more direction than most private practice lawyers are used to. Because decisions are shaped not only by legal strategy or commercial concerns, but institutional responsibilities, enforcement priorities, and the fact that we act in the public interest. I think the lawyers who struggle at CBLS are the ones who can't adjust to that reality. The ones who succeed are the ones who can come in with an open mind. You give your advice, you explain the risks and options, but once you've done that and the Bureau might decide to go in another direction, you do the best job you can for them.
00:57:16
Jonathan Hood
One other quality I think helps is intellectual humility. I learned early on that I am never the smartest person in the room. I'm constantly surrounded by very smart people, who all see the world through different lenses, and that is a fantastic thing. All I can control is how hard I work, but I live and die by the strengths of the teams I work with.
00:57:41
Jonathan Hood
Good ideas can come from anywhere, from anyone. I think if like if you have that collaborative spirit, not a lot of ego, you'll do pretty well at CBLS.
00:57:53
Julia Potter
That's great. And of course you want to learn more about you. I think you're known for wearing your beanies and that’s known across the bar and known in the Bureau, but can you tell us something about yourself that might surprise people who only know you professionally?
00:58:13
Jonathan Hood
Well, I moonlight as an amateur triathlete, though some people who I work with professionally might know this only because there was an article about it in Precedent Magazine. At the end of each issue, they do a profile about a lawyer and something they do outside of work.
00:58:29
Jonathan Hood
If you Google Jonathan Hood is a triple threat, that article will come up. There’s a picture, which I have joked is probably the only picture that should be used in my funeral. I'm standing there with my court shirt on top, wetsuit on bottom, holding my tri bike behind me, dripping wet. It's the coolest picture ever. It makes me look so good, but the only reason I started doing triathlons was because I left private practice. I was utterly unathletic growing up. I didn't participate in sports, and when you decide you're coming over to the government, that process takes time. There comes a point where you know you're going, but you have to go through and get security clearance, and all the stuff that comes along with starting in the government, so I started riding my bike to and from work.
00:59:17
Jonathan Hood
As I got closer, I had more time on my hands, so those rides got longer and longer. I was always comfortable swimming because I was lifeguard growing up, but I never ran, and to this day, I don't know what possessed me. I decided I would try running home from work. There's a 10-kilometer run from my office to my house. I'd never gone for a run before. At the time, the officers I worked with liked to bet, so they all bet if I would make it all the way home or if I'd peel off at one of the subway stations. Anyways, I made it home.
00:59:49
Jonathan Hood
I decided I wanted to do an Ironman.
00:59:53
Jonathan Hood
They were going to do one in Tremblant, Quebec for the first time in 2012, so I signed up. I had a secondhand road bike for 400 bucks. I put aero bars on it and I went. First time I ever did a marathon was when I did that Ironman. I did it in 12 hours and 40 minutes. I had no idea what I was doing or what I was getting into. But oddly, despite not being able to walk for the next week, I wanted to do it again, but do it properly. It takes like a lot of time to train properly, so I promised my wife I'd only do a full Ironman once every five years. I tried again. I got a coach, and I went back to Tremblant in 2017. This time I did the race in 10 hours and 48 minutes.
01:00:32
Jonathan Hood
It was good enough to place me in like 20th out of 300 in my age category, so I thought I want to qualify for the World Championships, and I'd love a top 10 finish. I tried in 2022 in Arizona. I'm not going to give you the gory details of that race. They announced in 2024 that that would be the last year for the Ironman in Tremblant, so I raced again in 2024.
01:00:54
Jonathan Hood
You do everything you can to prepare, but sometimes you just don't have the race you were hoping for. They announced they're bringing the Ironman to Ottawa in 2025. Normally I would take breaks, but how could I pass that up, right? This is the first time in Ottawa.
01:01:09
Jonathan Hood
It's as close as I'm ever going to get to racing at home. My family was there, my parents were there, people from work to support me. And I had the race of my lifetime.
01:01:19
Jonathan Hood
My 47-year-old self bested my 39-year-old self by nine minutes. I finished the race in 10 hours and 40 minutes, which put me in top 10 in my age category, and I qualified for the world champion.
01:01:31
Julia Potter
Congratulations, that is quite a feat.
01:01:35
Julia Potter
Yeah, and it's obviously quite this active personal life. How do you balance that with work? Sounds like you said this was something you started once you moved to CBLS, not so much in private practice, but even still, your case load is quite high. How do you manage?
01:01:50
Jonathan Hood
I don't know. I think I'm fortunate in the support I get from my family. I know there are people on Bay Street who do Ironmans and I have all the respect in the world. I don't know how they do it. I don't think I could. I may be able to set up my schedule so a lot of the training happens in the mornings, but it's like a heck of a time commitment. It goes in phases. During litigation, you’ll see my training drops completely off because all I'm doing is working for like two or three months while that goes down. Then other times when it's relatively quiet, I'm able to do a lot more, but I'm very lucky.
01:02:38
Julia Potter
Yeah, it makes sense. You do it when you can and as much as you can. And yeah, there's going to be waves of it. I think that's the general experience as lawyers, really. Well, thank you so much, Jonathan. Those are all the questions we had. I really appreciate you coming on to speak to us and to our listeners. Of course, thank you for tuning in as usual.
01:02:56
Julia Potter
And if you have any ideas, feel free to reach out to anybody on the podcast committee for future episodes. Thank you all.
01:03:03
Jonathan Hood
Thank you for having me.
1:03:04
Thank you for listening. Counterfactual is produced and distributed by the competition law and foreign investment review section at the Canadian Bar Association. The opinions expressed by the participants in this podcast are their own and do not necessarily represent those of their employer or other organizations. If you enjoyed this podcast or would like to join the Canadian Bar Association, please visit www.cba.org/sections/competition-law.