Canada’s Competition Tribunal has not granted a private applicant leave since 2015.

The capital is CAD $698.00 (USD $500 at 1.3960, Bank of Canada daily average, 30 October 2026 — the most recent posted rate at the time of writing) and the target is CAD $6,980.00 a month (USD $5,000), or CAD $83,760.00 a year. The claim of this edition is that Canada has built the cheapest private antitrust filing in the developed world and then, in its first interpretation of it, made the price of entry something money cannot buy on its own.

Start with what changed, because the date is exact and the text is short. The Justice Laws point-in-time consolidation labels one version of the section “Version of section 103.1 from 2025-06-20 to 2026-03-25”, and that version reads: “Any person may apply to the Tribunal for leave to make an application under section 74.1, 75, 76, 77, 79 or 90.1.” Before that day the list was ss. 75, 76 and 77 — refusal to deal, price maintenance, and exclusive dealing and tied selling. After it, a private person may also reach s. 74.1 (deceptive marketing), s. 79 (abuse of dominance) and s. 90.1 (anti-competitive agreements). Those are the three sections the Commissioner of Competition uses against the largest companies operating in Canada.

Then read what a winner gets, because this is the part almost nobody reported. Section 75(1.2), s. 79(4.1) and s. 90.1(10.1) are drafted in near-identical terms. Section 79(4.1), on abuse of dominance: if the Tribunal makes an order “as the result of an application by a person granted leave under section 103.1”, it “may also order the person against whom the order is made to pay an amount, not exceeding the value of the benefit derived from the conduct that is the subject of the order, to be distributed among the applicant and any other person affected by the conduct, in any manner that the Tribunal considers appropriate.” That is not an administrative monetary penalty, which is payable to the Crown. It is a transfer from the respondent to the person who filed.

Now price the ticket. The Competition Tribunal Act contains no fee provision at all: its only money sections are members’ remuneration, travel allowances under the Judges Act, and s. 8.1(5), which sends costs awarded to the Crown to the Receiver General. The Competition Tribunal Rules, SOR/2008-141, contain no tariff of fees and no filing fee; the single reference to fees in the whole instrument is rule 110(2), “The fees and disbursements related to the amicus curiae shall be fixed by the Tribunal.” Rule 115 sets out everything a leave application must contain: “an application for leave including an affidavit”, “a proposed notice of application and a memorandum of fact and law.” Three documents and no cheque. CAD $698.00 is not the constraint and never was.

So read the record, which is the only honest counterweight. Paul-Erik Veel and Donya Tamehi of Lenczner Slaght compiled every Competition Tribunal filing and decision and published the counts. From 2002, when private access began, to 2024: 32 leave applications filed, 9 granted. That is 1.39 applications a year in a country of forty-one million people, and a 28.125% grant rate. Private parties brought 23 of the 195 filings in the 2005–2024 dataset, 11.79%; the Commissioner brought the other 172. And the sentence that governs this edition: “no leave application has been granted since 2015.”

Eleven years. In that window nine more were filed to the end of 2024, and four since the regime widened on 20 June 2025 — 13 applications, nought grants. The four are Martin v. Alphabet, a tying and foreclosure application against Vistar Media in digital out-of-home advertising, an exclusive-dealing and abuse application against Apple Canada and Apple Inc., and an exclusivity and radius-clause application against Live Nation and Ticketmaster. Three are pending. One has been decided.

That one is worth reading slowly. Alexander Martin, a Toronto independent video-game developer who publishes as “droqen”, filed in June 2025 against Alphabet Inc., Google LLC, Google Canada Corporation, Apple Inc. and Apple Canada Inc., invoking s. 79 and s. 90.1 through the new public-interest branch of s. 103.1(7). On 13 January 2026 the Tribunal set a three-part test — a substantial and genuine competition dispute on affidavit evidence, a genuine and continuing interest, and whether the application is a reasonable and effective means of resolving the issue — and dismissed him, without costs, at the third part. He had identified no fact witnesses, retained no experts and filed no litigation plan, and the Tribunal held it must be scrupulous to screen out unmeritorious, vexatious and strategic claims at an early stage. The record before it was a one-page affidavit from the applicant and a paralegal’s affidavit attaching United States litigation materials.

Here is the part that breaks the pattern. Martin was not a man without a lawyer. He was represented by Berger Montague, which by reported account indemnified him — paying the costs of the case in exchange for a share of any money recovered. A funded, represented applicant, with the deepest-pocketed respondents in the world on the other side, failed the capacity branch anyway. Whatever “capacity and resources” means in this test, it is not satisfied by having found someone to pay.

And the signage has not caught up with the building. The Competition Tribunal’s own frequently-asked-questions page, date modified 2 March 2026 — eight months and ten days after the amendment — still tells the public that private parties may seek leave “under section 75…section 76 (price maintenance) or section 77 (exclusive dealing, tied selling and market restriction).” The Competition Bureau’s Information Bulletin on Private Access to the Competition Tribunal, issued 4 April 2005 and last modified 27 June 2024, is a further step behind: it says private access is “available only on matters brought pursuant to section 75 and section 77”, omitting even the s. 76 route added in 2009. Two federal bodies, between them, describe a regime that has not existed for seventeen months and a list of sections that has not been right since 2009.

Which leaves the arithmetic, and it is unkind. A single award is not a salary, so the comparison has to be made on the clock the Tribunal actually runs: the Lenczner Slaght dataset puts an initially contested case at an average of 536 days, or 1.468493 years, and that is after leave, not including it. To pay CAD $83,760.00 a year across 536 days, one win must be worth CAD $123,000.99. Divide by the historic 28.125% grant rate and the expected-value ticket is CAD $437,336.84 — 626.56× the starting capital. Against the record since 2015, nought of thirteen, no finite award clears it at all, because the multiplier is division by zero.

So the non-consensus reading is not that this is a get-rich scheme that works. It is that commentary spent eighteen months on the public-interest door, which is the expensive one, and almost none on the door that was already open. Section 103.1(7) offers two routes to the same remedy: “reason to believe that the applicant is directly and substantially affected” in its business, or satisfaction that leave is “in the public interest.” The first asks what was done to you. The second, as of 13 January 2026, asks for your witness list, your expert retainers and your budget. A reader who has actually been cut off by a supplier is applying under a test about injury. A reader who is merely right about a monopoly is applying under a test about means.