A senior Amazon executive said the company will shutter its e-commerce platform Marketplace in Canada should the federal government adopt changes to the country’s competition laws similar to those being legislated in the U.S., a recording obtained by The Logic reveals.

“If Canada were to adopt U.S.-style antitrust legislation—the six bills currently in Congress—we’ve said it in the U.S., we’d have to shut down Marketplace. You would see similar action in Canada in response to similar policy measures,” said Amazon’s public policy director for Canada, James Maunder, during a meeting last year. The Logic is not publishing the details of the meeting to protect the source of the recording.

At the same gathering, Maunder cited “the work we’ve been doing” with U.S. law professor Daniel Sokol and former Competition Bureau Canada commissioner John Pecman. Both Sokol and Pecman have written reports and op-eds critical of reform of the Competition Act, the country’s abiding antitrust regulation that some critics say must be updated to contain Big Tech’s power and reach. 

Maunder’s declarations give a glimpse of Amazon’s vigorous behind-the-scenes campaign to head off changes to the act, which have been under discussion in Ottawa for nearly a year. In October 2021, Competition Bureau commissioner Matthew Boswell said he planned to lead a comprehensive review of the laws, in part to address the “more complex anti-competitive conduct” within digital marketplaces. The bureau’s fines and penalties, he said, “don’t meaningfully deter anti-competitive conduct or promote compliance for large companies in today’s digital marketplace.”

Maunder didn’t respond to a list of questions about the potential shutdown of Amazon Marketplace, or the nature of Amazon’s collaboration with Pecman and Sokol. In an email, Amazon spokesperson Kristin Gable directed The Logic to Amazon’s blog post criticizing proposed U.S. antitrust legislation.

Amazon hasn’t publicly addressed the prospect of reforms affecting Big Tech in Canada, which are expected to come after the first comprehensive reassessment of the laws in 15 years. (The review is meant to begin in the next few weeks, according to a government source.) Yet the Seattle-based company has already mounted a defence against further legislative reforms. As Amazon Web Services Canada and Amazon Corporate, it has lobbied Anson Duran, a senior policy advisor to Innovation Minister François-Philippe Champagne, three times in May and June, according to the federal lobbyist registry. As The Logic reported in June, Amazon created a job position for a lobbyist in Canada, dedicated to “digital policy issues” at the federal, provincial and municipal levels. 

Many businesses would be affected were Amazon to cease operating Marketplace. The Canadian version, launched in 2003, supports over 40,000 third-party sellers in Canada. It’s also the second-largest Amazon Marketplace for third-party sellers in the world, after the United States, according to a 2022 report from the market-analytics firm Jungle Scout. 

“As a small- and medium-sized business, you don’t have the complete trust of your customer ordering on the website, so they’ll just go to Amazon because they know they’re not going to  have any issues,” said Aaron Turner, COO of Symbodi, a New Brunswick-based company that sells wall-mounted muscle massagers. Half of Symbodi’s e-commerce sales come from Amazon Marketplace, where the company began selling around January 2020, Turner said. “It becomes more expensive to have to order from the U.S. or straight from China.”

The federal government’s desire to update the Competition Act dates back to 2019, when then-innovation minister Navdeep Bains instructed Boswell to consider the potential dangers of market dominance and “emerging data monopolies” posed by large digital merchants. 

Boswell has since announced the creation of a digital enforcement and intelligence branch, while calling for increased enforcement powers for the bureau, as well as “a comprehensive review” of the existing Competition Act. Competition Act reform is on the minds of many Canadians, with some 88 per cent saying the country needs more competition “because it’s too easy for big business to take advantage of Canadians,” according to a February Ipsos poll.

In the recording obtained by The Logic, Maunder seemed aware of the growing concern. “For folks who aren’t sophisticated on these sorts of issues, they get conflated with this narrative that Amazon is too big [and] unfairly profited due to the pandemic, and government needs to take action,” Maunder said, in an apparent reference to misinformation, privacy and other hot-button issues affecting Big Tech in addition to competition.

In an email, Competition Bureau spokesperson Marie-Christine Vézina wouldn’t say whether the bureau was aware of Amazon’s apparent intention to shut down Marketplace in Canada. “As the Competition Bureau is required by law to conduct its work confidentially, I’m not in position to provide any information with respect to Amazon’s position towards the amendments to the Competition Act, nor can I confirm meetings between the bureau and the company,” she said.

Amazon’s campaign against reforms in Canada went beyond lobbying and the threat of scuttling Marketplace. In 2020, the year he became public policy director, Maunder also became a board member of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce and of the right-leaning think tank C.D. Howe’s International Economic Policy Council. 

Amazon Canada gave a major grant to C.D. Howe in 2021, according to the latter’s annual report, though in an interview with The Logic C.D. Howe vice-president Daniel Schwanen wouldn’t reveal its size. “Our job is to research and inform this super important topic. And so naturally, we do that, and actually put more resources into that. But I can tell you that we’ve been doing this for many decades,” Schwanen said.

Since November, Pecman has authored three opinion pieces critical of Competition Act reform that were published by the Financial Post, one of which was reprinted on the C.D. Howe website. The law professor Sokol contributed an article critical of more Big Tech regulation to C.D. Howe and, with University of Toronto associate professor Anthony Niblett, co-wrote a paper for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute (MLI) arguing against what they called “radical changes” to the Competition Act.

In an email, MLI spokesperson Brett Byers wouldn’t say whether Amazon had contributed to the institute. “We do not share internal financial or funder information publicly,” Byers said. “All MLI projects are determined and designed by our experts, staff, and program leads; we receive no direction from any entity when it comes to the design and execution of our projects.”

For his part, Pecman cancelled an interview shortly after The Logic spoke to C.D. Howe’s Schwanen, and did not respond to subsequent emails seeking comment. Vézina, the Competition Bureau spokesperson, told The Logic via email that the organization was “not aware of Mr. Pecman’s collaborations, as he is a private citizen and no longer works at the bureau.”

Sokol told The Logic via email that he hadn’t been compensated or supported by Amazon, and the company had no input in his writings for the think tanks. Niblett didn’t respond to an email requesting comment.

In an email, Canadian Chamber of Commerce spokesperson Emily Walsh declined to say whether Amazon had donated to the organization. “Any information related to contributions by individual members or companies is proprietary,” Walsh said. 

Amazon has been at the forefront of Big Tech’s global offensive against antitrust reform, just as governments in the U.S. and the EU are updating antitrust legislation to include the digital economy and the large companies dominating it. In the blog post, the US$1.3-trillion company said a bipartisan U.S. tech-competition bill would “cause serious and damaging unintended consequences for American consumers and small businesses the bills purport to protect” should it become law. (On Wednesday, the state of California filed an antitrust lawsuit against Amazon alleging that it punishes companies that offer lower prices on websites other than its own.)

Along with Google, Apple and Facebook, Amazon has donated to various U.S. think tanks, including the Center for a New American Security in 2020–21 and the Brookings Institution in 2019. Some figures affiliated with many of these think tanks have echoed Big Tech’s view on U.S. antitrust legislation. All told, Amazon, Google, Apple and Meta have spent nearly US$95 million since 2021 lobbying against this legislation, whose future is in doubt as the clock ticks toward the midterm break.

In Canada, The Globe and Mail referred to MLI in February as one of several “influential Canadian voices” who “often loudly champion the status quo.” The piece quotes Pecman, who says “too many” regulations on Big Tech would “harm economic growth.”

Correction: James Maunder is a member of C.D. Howe’s International Economic Policy Council. This story has been updated.