Watchdog highlights Freedom Mobile ad in trial

The Competition Bureau enlisted Will Arnett’s help as it began its case against the Rogers-Shaw merger using an old TV commercial to illustrate what it says telecom consumers will lose if the $26-billion takeover goes ahead.

During an opening statement before the Competition Tribunal on Monday, lawyers for the federal watchdog played a clip from a Freedom Mobile ad the actor starred in back in 2019. The spot featured three executives in a darkened boardroom laughing about charging their customers even more for wireless data.

“Because they always pay!” chanted the executives, a parody of the leaders of Canada’s dominant three wireless companies, Rogers, Bell and Telus.

Cue Arnett, who outlined one of the latest offers from Freedom Mobile ($50 for 10 gigabytes of data, a very good deal at the time) and said millions of customers had switched to the upstart carrier in recent years.

“That was the kind of disruptive, competitive player that Shaw has been in the marketplace in terms of the wireless market,” said John Tyhurst, the lead lawyer for the Competition Bureau, who said the bureau would show more examples of that through internal documents from Rogers and Shaw it plans to advance as evidence.

Kent Thomson, the lead lawyer for Shaw, hit back at the bureau in his own opening statement, accusing the bureau of “dramatic overreach” and arguing that the watchdog’s case is based on “fundamental misapprehensions concerning both the facts and the law.”

The bureau is seeking a full block of the deal despite the fact that almost all of its concerns relate to the wireless business, Thomson said.

Rogers and Shaw have argued that their separate deal to sell Freedom Mobile to Quebec telecom Vidéotron addresses concerns about the loss of competition in the wireless industry.

Freedom operates in British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario, but Thomson noted that more than 70 per cent of its customers are in southern Ontario, where Shaw does not have any cable networks and does not bundle TV and internet service with its cellphone offering.

Later, Jonathan Lisus, a lawyer acting for Rogers, urged the tribunal to approach the case with “common sense” in mind, adding, “The transaction … is manifestly procompetitive.”

The trial is set to last four weeks and final oral arguments are scheduled for Dec. 13 and 14.