Ira Wells teaches in the Vic One program of the University of Toronto.

While some nations nurture competition, Canadians love monopolies.

Sure, we have our Competition Bureau, the government agency that pays lip service to “promoting competition for the benefit of Canadian consumers and business.” Meanwhile, near-monopolistic conditions reign in sectors ranging from telecom (where almost 90 per cent of business is split between Rogers, Bell and Telus) to air travel (where Air Canada and WestJet account for more than 80 per cent of our domestic market share) to banking (where the six largest banks control 80 per cent of assets) to groceries (where more than 50 per cent of the market is controlled by Loblaws and Sobeys, and 75 per cent is controlled by the top five retailers).

It feels cosmically appropriate that Canada should have exactly one National Basketball Association franchise and one Major League Baseball team, just as one corporation is responsible for selling nearly all the liquor in the country’s largest province.

Canada’s fondness for monopoly is an effect with multiple causes, from our history and geography to a small ruling class that has sympathized with the biggest players in business. Yet beneath these factors lies an unacknowledged story about the nature of Canada. This story, which the famed professor Northrop Frye once called the “garrison mentality,” emerges from the imaginative depths of the Canadian wilderness. It is deep within our bones and in our blood – the belief that forming dominant organizations is inherently virtuous.

We’ve long latched on to a truism that competition doesn’t always make sense in every industry. Historically, governments have invoked the principle of “common carriage” to regulate industries whose services are crucial to citizens’ daily lives. Beginning in the Gilded Age, according to scholar Zephyr Teachout, politicians and organizers applied common carriage “to a wide range of goods and services that were important to society but could not be easily or effectively provided in a decentralized way, such as water, electricity, gas, the telegraph, and transportation” – what we now call “public utilities.”

Yet Canadians have come to accept monopolies and near-monopolies as our default business setting, in contexts that extend far beyond traditional public utilities. Our love of monopoly is not some abstract ideological commitment: We are willing to pay for the privilege of allowing our largest corporations to continue their unbridled expansion.

The most egregious facts are well known. A 2022 study found that Canada’s wireless rates were the second most expensive in the world – seven times more expensive than Australia, 25 times more expensive than France and Ireland and 1,000 times more expensive than Finland. Another study found that international flights from Canada were the most expensive in the world: the average international flight on Air Canada and WestJet costs $123.52 per 100 kilometres, while Air Transat charged $57.02 for the same distance. Canadians pay an average monthly fee of $11 on their checking accounts; Americans pay an average of $7. Milk is 25 per cent more expensive in Canada than the U.S., at least partly because of our dairy monopoly. And on it goes.

South of the border, politicians from across the political spectrum wrap themselves in the antitrust banner, from the moderate Democrat Amy Klobuchar to the 2020 election-denying Republican Josh Hawley. Few are as ferocious as Elizabeth Warren, who routinely excoriated the Big Tech, Big Pharma and other conglomerates.

“When those giants kill off competition, prices go up, quality goes down, and jobs are eliminated,” Ms. Warren warned in 2017. “Massive consolidation means the big guys can lock out smaller, newer competitors. It means the big guys can crush innovation. It means the big guys can muzzle ideas and voices they don’t like.”

Canadian politicians, by contrast and regardless of the side of their aisle, all get along swimmingly with our own big guys. We lack a powerful, mainstream anti-monopoly movement, perhaps because our largest corporations come cloaked in nationalist garb. More insidiously, our unacknowledged national mythologies have primed us to accept the idea that Canadian business – even our most rapacious, bungling corporations – must be protected, because we must hunker down and save one another.

These narratives have indoctrinated a belief not only that Canadians cannot compete, but that the very idea of competition is un-Canadian or (gasp) American. It is a narrative that serves a tiny, mostly racially homogeneous corporate elite, to the colossal detriment of Canadian consumers, working people and people of colour.

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This history of monopoly in Canada is intimately bound up with legacies of British colonialism in North America. In 1670, King Charles II granted a Royal Charter to the “Governor and Company of Adventurers Trading into Hudson Bay,” creating a commercial fur-trading monopoly and providing exclusive rights to a swath of land extending from Labrador to the Pacific Northwest, equivalent to one-12th of the Earth’s land mass.

The Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) assumed not only a commercial monopoly, but also de facto governmental control of Rupert’s Land – so named after King Charles’s first cousin and the HBC’s first governor, Prince Rupert – on the unceded territory of Indigenous peoples around the Hudson Bay watershed and farther west. The HBC surrendered its monopoly shortly after Confederation, partly because the company wasn’t sufficiently enthusiastic about Western settlement. Nevertheless, for nearly 200 years, almost half of the land that constitutes present-day Canada was ruled by one company.

Monopoly remained the rule rather than the exception as Canadian industry developed over the course of the 19th century. In his 1940 study The Control of Competition in Canada, scholar Lloyd Reynolds observed that the earliest Canadian business “carried on outside of the home seems to have been largely in the hands of local monopolists. The village grist mill, the village smithy, and the village harness maker were protected by transport costs from the competition of producers and other localities.”

The arrival of the railroad, itself a monopoly, introduced some competition – along with a powerful desire to contain and suppress that competition. “The earliest investigations” into 19th-century Canadian business practices “reveal full-blown cartels already in existence,” according to Mr. Reynolds.

Part of this tendency toward monopoly emerges, perhaps, from the juxtaposition of Canada’s comparatively minuscule domestic consumer market with our vast geographic territory spread across distinct regions – conditions that, some argued, made oligopoly (if not outright monopoly) inevitable in Canadian markets. For years, according to Mr. Reynolds, Imperial Oil refined nearly all the oil in Canada.

Others have argued that Canadian monopolists continued to thrive unchecked because their exploits were not as brazen as their U.S. brethren. We never had our “Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Gould and company, with their flagrant abuses of economic power,” economist George Wilson observed. “Consequently, an ingrained mistrust of bigness or monopoly power is not as prevalent in Canada as in the U.S.”

Despite the existence of laws designed to curb anti-competitive business practices, Mr. Wilson found a long historical record of “passivity and ineffectiveness” in their enforcement – owing to what he called the “‘business’ point of view” that helped sway Parliament. Mr. Wilson pointed to former minister of trade and commerce Henry Herbert Stevens, who denigrated the 1923 Combines Investigation Act: “My chief criticism of the bill is that in effect it declares to be a crime that which is without question ordinary, sound business sense.”

While the Combines Investigation Act was intended to prevent mergers and anti-competitive business practices, some in Ottawa held the view that such practices were a perfectly rational, indeed preferable, way of doing business.

Despite continued attempts at course correction – in 2022, the government passed amendments to the Competition Act to prohibit wage-fixing and no-poaching agreements between employers – successive governments have failed meaningfully to stand up to monopolistic tendencies. This spring, Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne approved Rogers’s $26-billion takeover of Shaw, further consolidating its dominance in an already concentrated telecom space. Proponents of the deal, including Mr. Champagne, argued that it could “drive down prices across Canada,” despite reducing consumer choice in Alberta and B.C.

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All explanations for Canada’s love of monopolies ultimately lead to our myths of the past. Where the British and American cultural imagination often construed nature as a site of regeneration or renewal – think of Thoreau’s Walden Pond or the spiritually ennobling nature of English Romantic poetry – the Canadian wilderness is a site of “deep terror,” Prof. Frye argued. Our wilderness was not a source of pleasure or spiritual rejuvenation, it was a source of trauma and death. Our early literature was replete with stories of people dying of exposure, being eaten alive, falling through the ice, going insane in the bush.

Opposed to this terrifying vision of nature was the life-sustaining garrison. Denizens of these isolated, beleaguered communities were “compelled to feel a great respect for the law and order that holds them together, yet were confronted with a huge, unthinking, menacing, and formidable setting,” Prof. Frye wrote in The Bush Garden. “Such communities are bound to develop what we may call a garrison mentality.”

The garrison mentality required those within the fort’s protective ramparts to band together against fatal outside forces. The stakes were life or death, and “one is either a fighter or a deserter,” Prof. Frye wrote. Such conditions did not exactly foster individuality, much less internal competition. Indeed, the expansion of the garrison mentality brought “a dominating herd-mind in which nothing original can grow,” he argued.

To be clear, Prof. Frye was less interested in the quotidian history (what transpired in 18th-century forts) than in the fearful, irreducibly settler-colonial mindset that came from imagining yourself surrounded by death on all sides. Our deep aversion to internal competition flows from the belief that we are all in this together, united against the menacing world beyond our gates. To resist the injunctions of the collective, much less court rivals from the outside world, is to be a “deserter.”

The “garrison mentality” is one name for the deeply entrenched cultural mythology that compels our unthinking submission to what we are told is our communal interest.

The garrison walls are now social constructs rather than timber stockades, and yet our imaginative garrisons continue to proliferate, supposedly to prevent Canadian industry from dying of foreign exposure. Our governments approve mergers and countenance market consolidation on the grounds that bigger Canadian companies will be more likely to survive.

The latest iteration of this argument comes from those behind the proposed merger between the Toronto Star and Postmedia, who argue that greater scale will allow the larger entity “to compete with the global technology giants.” Now abandoned, the merger would have reduced competition in an already highly consolidated media sector. Nevertheless, the proponents have argued about how this Torstar-Postmedia merger will “protect” Canadian news.

Similar sentiments flow through the supply-management boards that supposedly safeguard our egg, chicken and dairy industries and keep prices low for consumers. Rationally, we understand that high consumer prices may result from inefficiencies within those industries, and that boards have no power to compel increased efficiency, thus serving “as a legal shelter for existing investments,” as Mr. Reynolds observed decades ago. Yet our understanding of these facts is overwhelmed by a national mythology that directs us to protect the national option at all costs.

Indeed, our unconscious mythologies are often at odds with what we consciously claim to know about the world. For instance, we increasingly recognize the acute wealth inequality in Canada – where the top 1 per cent of families own a quarter of total wealth, while the bottom 40 per cent own 1.1 per cent – and the harmful consequences of heightened inequality, from negative health outcomes to lower economic growth. Yet we seem to ignore these facts when confronted with arguments for further consolidation. This amounts to ever greater wealth and market power for the likes of the Rogers family, with their estimated $10-billion fortune, alongside some of the highest wireless rates in the world for Canadian consumers.

While, outside of elected politics, some conservatives have long railed against monopolies with appeals to greater competition and market efficiencies – the Fraser Institute, for instance, bemoans that nearly one-quarter of the Canadian economy is shielded from competition – progressives should be equally outraged by the way in which monopolistic tendencies work to consolidate wealth and power in the hands of the few. The fight for racial justice must include the fight against monopoly.

While small organizations (such as the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project) do exist, Canada is in desperate need of a mainstream political champion of greater competitiveness – a movement that could find broad support from across the spectrum. Such a stand would require courage. It’s one thing to condemn the bread price-fixing scheme that, according to the Competition Bureau, has leeched millions from our pocketbooks over the past 14 years; it’s quite another to stand up to the constellation of special-interest groups and lawyers who fight against strengthened antitrust legislation.

We must also reckon with those underlying national fictions that have crystalized, over time, into political theologies and economic doctrine. We are no longer ruled by the Hudson’s Bay Company, but we continue to huddle within economic garrisons and industrial fortifications that appeal to our sense of protection, but that only serve to stunt our economic potential and redistribute wealth to the top.

The garrison mentality, which germinated a network of neofeudal corporate fiefdoms that continue to rule over the economic lives of Canadians, has persisted long enough. Greater competitiveness can be nurtured not only through new economic policies, but through a less defensive, more robust vision of Canada and our place in the world.

As one imperilled institution was wont to say: “The world needs more Canada.” Do we believe that to be true? Why not throw open the doors and find out?