Canada's competition regulator wants feedback on new rules for how businesses compete, and insurers have until late January to weigh in.
The Competition Bureau launched a public consultation on October 31, 2025, for its proposed Anti-Competitive Conduct and Agreements Enforcement Guidelines, marking the first comprehensive update to enforcement guidance following significant amendments to the Competition Act between 2022 and 2024. The consultation period runs until January 29, 2026, giving Canadian businesses including insurance carriers, brokers, and industry associations a limited window to provide feedback on rules that will govern competitive conduct across all sectors.
The guidelines cover five areas: abuse of dominance, agreements that harm competition, refusals to deal, price maintenance, and tied selling, exclusive dealing and market restriction. Together, the Bureau calls these the ACCA provisions, shorthand for anti-competitive conduct and agreements.
For insurers, the rules touch everyday business practices. Take exclusive dealing, where a carrier might ask brokers to focus primarily on its products. The Bureau can now examine whether such arrangements make it harder for competitors to gain a foothold in the market.
Price maintenance provisions directly affect how insurers structure relationships with distributors. The guidelines enable the Bureau to act when suppliers influence prices upward or discourage price reductions through agreements, threats, or promises in ways that harm competition. That could affect how carriers discuss commission structures or premium strategies with their distribution networks.
Then there's information sharing, a common practice when industry associations and insurers exchange data for benchmarking. The Bureau warns this can cross a line when it helps competitors coordinate their behavior or reduces their incentive to compete independently.
The guidelines spell out how competitor agreements can harm competition: by limiting independent decision-making, reducing competitive incentives, enabling coordination, or supporting other anti-competitive actions. Insurers involved in joint ventures, syndication deals or trade associations will need to consider these factors.
Market power runs through the entire framework. The Bureau defines it as the ability to profitably influence price, quality, variety, service, advertising, innovation or other dimensions of competition. Regulators will look at market share, barriers to entry, negotiating strength and whether a company can exclude rivals.
Companies with more than 30 percent market share are more likely to attract scrutiny, though the threshold rises for abuse of dominance cases. With consolidation continuing in Canadian insurance, that benchmark matters for larger carriers and broker networks.
The rules apply to civil cases investigated by the Competition Bureau and brought before the Competition Tribunal. Penalties can include administrative monetary penalties and orders to stop the conduct or restore market competition.
One wrinkle: the Bureau notes that a single business practice might violate multiple provisions at once. That means insurers need to evaluate their competitive practices against several standards, not just one.
The guidelines replace earlier versions on abuse of dominance, competitor collaboration and price maintenance. The update reflects changes Parliament made to the Competition Act between 2022 and 2024.
