Bill C-59 received royal assent on June 20, 2024, and it reshaped two very different corners of Canadian business life: how companies talk about their environmental impact, and how they combine with one another. Parliament then revisited one of those corners less than two years later, narrowing the environmental-claims regime through Bill C-15 in March 2026. For anyone whose job involves watching legislation like this before it affects a campaign or a deal, this is exactly the kind of shift that Gnowit’s legislative and regulatory monitoring platform is built to surface early, tracking the bill itself, the committee debate around it, and the Competition Bureau guidance that followed, all from public federal sources in one place.
The Fall Economic Statement Implementation Act, 2023 rewrote large sections of the Competition Act. Most coverage focused on the headline-grabbing greenwashing provisions, but the merger review changes are arguably just as consequential for anyone involved in a Canadian transaction. For marketing teams, legal counsel, and government relations professionals alike, both halves of this amendment package are worth understanding in detail.
This was the third round of Competition Act reform in roughly two years, following Bill C-19 in 2022 and Bill C-56 in 2023, and Parliament has since amended the Act again through Bill C-15 in 2026. In our assessment, taken together these amendments represent the most significant overhaul of Canadian competition law in a generation. Through the reform period, the Competition Bureau under then-Commissioner Matthew Boswell signalled that it intended to use its expanded powers actively rather than let them sit on the books. Boswell’s term ended on December 17, 2025, and the Bureau currently identifies Jeanne Pratt as Acting Commissioner of Competition.
New rules for environmental claims
The provisions that generated the most attention were added to section 74.01 of the Act. Bill C-59 created two distinct substantiation requirements. Claims about a product’s environmental benefits must be based on an adequate and proper test, while claims about the environmental benefits of a business or business activity must be adequately and properly substantiated. Bill C-59 originally required business-level substantiation to accord with an internationally recognized methodology, but Parliament removed that language through Bill C-15, the Budget 2025 Implementation Act, No. 1, which received royal assent on March 26, 2026. In practice, the testing standard in paragraph 74.01(1)(b.1) applies to product-level claims such as recyclability or carbon-neutral packaging, while the substantiation standard in paragraph 74.01(1)(b.2) applies to broader business-activity claims such as net-zero pledges or emissions-reduction targets.
The new provisions continue the Act’s advertiser-side burden for certain performance and substantiation claims: businesses making claims within paragraphs 74.01(1)(b.1) and (b.2) must establish the required testing or substantiation. That does not shift the burden for every environmental representation. A challenge under the Act’s general false-or-misleading representation provision, paragraph 74.01(1)(a), must still be proved by the party bringing it. Nor is the advertiser-side burden entirely new, since the Act’s pre-existing product-performance provision already placed the burden of proving adequate testing on the advertiser.
The second structural feature was private access. As of June 20, 2025, private parties, including individuals and advocacy organizations, gained the ability to apply directly to the Competition Tribunal without routing through the Bureau first. Two qualifications matter: applicants require leave, and for deceptive-marketing applications the Tribunal must consider whether granting leave is in the public interest. Bill C-15 then narrowed that route on March 26, 2026. Private parties can no longer bring applications under the business or business-activity provision in paragraph 74.01(1)(b.2), while private applications remain possible under the product provision in paragraph 74.01(1)(b.1) and under the general deceptive-marketing provisions.
The change initially raised the prospect of more privately initiated challenges, although private Tribunal enforcement did not develop as quickly as some observers anticipated, and Parliament narrowed private access in March 2026. As of the March 2026 amendments, Osler reported that no private or public applications challenging environmental claims had been filed with the Competition Tribunal under the deceptive-marketing provisions.
Separate Quebec class-action litigation, including proceedings concerning allegedly recyclable bags sold by Dollarama and other retailers, illustrates the broader litigation risk surrounding environmental representations. That case was filed in 2022, predates Bill C-59, and should not be treated as a test of its new private-access provisions.
After consulting on draft guidance released in December 2024, the Competition Bureau published final environmental-claims guidelines on June 5, 2025. The guidelines set out six high-level principles and state that forward-looking claims should be supported by a concrete, realistic and verifiable plan, interim targets, and meaningful steps toward implementation. The guidance is not binding on the Competition Tribunal or the courts and must now be read in light of the March 2026 amendments.
The guidelines also address a due diligence defence, though its effect is narrower than it may first appear. According to the Bureau, a business that establishes due diligence may still be ordered to stop the conduct, while avoiding an administrative monetary penalty, restitution, and corrective-notice requirements.
The practical effect on marketing teams showed up quickly. Some organizations pulled sustainability language from websites and packaging altogether rather than risk a challenge, a trend critics have dubbed “greenhushing.” For teams managing messaging across multiple provinces, or across Canadian and international markets simultaneously, that caution carries a real commercial cost, and it makes staying current on regulatory change tracking for Bureau guidance and Tribunal decisions genuinely useful rather than a nice-to-have, since terms like “adequate and proper substantiation” are still being defined case by case.
A tougher path to closing a deal
While marketers were adjusting their copy, deal teams were absorbing a much larger shift in how mergers get reviewed. Under the old section 96, merging parties could defend an otherwise anticompetitive transaction by showing that projected efficiency gains would offset the harm to competition. The standalone efficiencies defence for mergers was repealed through Bill C-56 in December 2023, before Bill C-59. Bill C-59 formed part of the same reform sequence and removed the corresponding efficiencies exception from section 90.1’s civil agreement-review regime. Section 90.1 is now broader than competitor collaboration alone: following amendments, it can capture certain agreements involving non-competitors where a significant purpose is to prevent or lessen competition. Efficiencies may still form part of the broader competitive-effects analysis, but they no longer operate as a standalone statutory defence.
Bill C-59 then layered new structural presumptions on top of that change. A merger is presumed likely to substantially prevent or lessen competition where it produces a Herfindahl-Hirschman Index increase greater than 100, combined with either a post-merger HHI greater than 1,800 or a combined market share of the merging parties greater than 30 percent. These thresholds closely resemble thresholds in the 2023 U.S. Merger Guidelines, but in Canada they are written directly into legislation rather than into guidelines regulators can adjust as markets evolve. The presumption is rebuttable: once it applies, the merging parties can attempt to establish that the merger is not likely to prevent or lessen competition substantially.
Bill C-59 also removed the former subsection 92(2), which prevented the Tribunal from finding a substantial prevention or lessening of competition solely on the basis of concentration or market-share evidence, and replaced it with a rebuttable structural presumption tied to specified HHI and market-share thresholds. Concentration and market-share data can therefore weigh more heavily in a review on their own. On the procedural side, pre-merger notification thresholds were broadened so that sales into Canada now count toward the transaction-size threshold. The notification rules also require assets or revenues associated with the share-acquisition and asset-acquisition components of a mixed transaction to be aggregated when applying the relevant threshold, pulling more deals into mandatory pre-closing review. The Commissioner gained a longer window, three years instead of one, to challenge transactions that were never notified in the first place, and the Tribunal’s remedial powers were strengthened to restore competition rather than merely address the harm.
For deal teams, the combined effect is a merger review environment where market share and concentration data carry more weight earlier in the process, where more transactions require formal notification, and where the historical safety valve of proving net efficiency gains is largely off the table. Legal and corporate development teams are responding by front-loading market share analysis and building longer regulatory timelines into deal structuring.
Two teams, one shared problem
It’s tempting to treat greenwashing rules as a marketing problem and merger rules as a legal problem, but both amendments share a common thread: they reward organizations that can demonstrate substantiation and foresight, and penalize those relying on assumptions or outdated playbooks. A marketing team drafting a sustainability claim now needs the same evidentiary discipline a deal team applies to a market share calculation. Government relations professionals, meanwhile, need visibility into both tracks, since further Bureau guidance and Tribunal rulings will keep shifting the practical thresholds on each side.
That’s the gap bill tracking in Canada is meant to close when it’s built around more than the bill number itself. The Competition Act amendments didn’t arrive as a single bill; they came as a sequence, from Bill C-56 through Bill C-59 and on to Bill C-15, alongside the Bureau’s evolving guidance. Catching committee motions and regulatory notices as they surface tends to flag the next amendment well before it’s a headline.
For policy leads and advocacy teams specifically, legislative monitoring software for advocacy efforts gives a single view of Bureau consultations, draft guidelines, and Tribunal activity, replacing a rotation of newsletters and manual searches with alerts tied to the Acts and topics a team actually cares about.
How Gnowit covers a file like this
A single amendment package like Bill C-59 rarely stays static once it’s in force, as the March 2026 changes show. Legislative Monitoring follows the Act’s progress and any further amendments through every stage, Curation Edge filters and prioritizes Competition Bureau guidance and consultation updates so they don’t get lost in general trade news, and Hansardwatch makes the underlying committee transcripts searchable when you need to see exactly how a provision was debated. All are part of the same subscription, not separate products.
A short checklist before you assume your monitoring has this covered
- Are your alerts scoped to section 74.01 and the merger review provisions specifically, or lumped under a broad “competition law” category?
- Are you tracking Competition Bureau guidance updates and consultations directly, not just the original bill text?
- Do you have visibility into Competition Tribunal rulings as they’re decided, including private-party applications?
- Does that coverage distinguish product claims under paragraph 74.01(1)(b.1), business-level claims under paragraph 74.01(1)(b.2), and general deceptive-marketing claims, given that private access to the business-level provision was removed in March 2026?
- Is your monitoring set up to catch the next amendment in this sequence, given the Act has already changed four times since 2022?
- Can your marketing and legal teams see the same alerts, or are they working from two different tracking processes?
Talk to Gnowit about your specific files
The fastest way to know whether your current monitoring actually covers this file is to see it configured against the provisions, Bureau updates, and Tribunal activity you’re responsible for, not a generic overview. Book a short conversation with our team to walk through your competition law tracking setup.
Book a 30-minute conversation https://tidycal.com/gnowit/30min-1jjryrq
Where to verify the details
The Competition Bureau publishes its own guidance and consultation updates directly, and it remains the authoritative source for how the greenwashing and merger provisions are being interpreted in practice. Its page on environmental claims and greenwashing sets out the current substantiation requirements, and the final guidelines on environmental claims and the Competition Act cover the six principles in detail. For the March 2026 rollback, see Osler’s update on further amendments to the environmental claims provisions. For a detailed legal breakdown of the merger provisions, including the structural presumption thresholds and the expanded notification regime, Osler’s analysis of the amended Competition Act is a solid reference, and the Bureau’s guide to the December 2023 amendments explains the Bill C-56 changes that preceded them.
The bottom line
Bill C-59 increased the evidentiary demands on businesses, but the applicable burden depends on the provision. Product environmental-benefit claims require adequate and proper testing, while business-level environmental-benefit claims require adequate and proper substantiation. In merger reviews, transactions meeting the statutory concentration thresholds face a rebuttable presumption of substantial competitive harm. Both regimes reward early evidence gathering, but neither shifts every legal burden to the business in every case.
For marketing teams, that means general environmental claims remain subject to the prohibition against materially false or misleading representations, while the particular testing and substantiation requirements depend on the type of claim being made. Deal teams need market share and concentration analysis earlier in the process, not after a term sheet is signed. And any organization tracking how enforcement trends develop before its own campaign or transaction goes to market benefits from treating this as an ongoing watch item rather than a one-time read, as the March 2026 amendments demonstrate.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Gnowit track Competition Bureau guidance and Tribunal decisions, or only the bill text itself?
Both, on the same platform. Bureau consultations, draft guidelines, and Tribunal rulings are monitored alongside the legislation itself, not as a separate add-on.
Can alerts be scoped to specific provisions, like the greenwashing rules or merger review changes, rather than competition law in general?
Yes. Alerts follow the Acts, provisions, or keywords your team selects, and you control who on the team receives each one.
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