It is bad public policy from the standpoint of being a huge net that is cast on many Canadians who are now honest taxpaying people who will be required to start to fill in extensive forms, add to the cost of their operations, and signal yet another incursion into what people consider to be their private business in the property they own.

Mr. Steven Shrybman: The way I would answer that is to say you would probably be likely to run into more trouble under the technical barriers to trade agreement of the WTO, although of course corporations could argue that any constraint on their ability to operate here is an effective expropriation of their business opportunities and therefore compensable under these rules.

Under the Regulation, the Commission has exclusive jurisdiction to assess mergers above certain turnover thresholds.

Holcim notified the proposed acquisition to the Commission on 3 September 2013, because the transaction met the turnover thresholds of the EU Merger Regulation.

The simplified procedure followed by the Commission concerns merger transactions: (a) where the joint venture's turnover and total assets are each less than 100 million; (b) where, in the case of a merger or of acquisition of sole or joint control of another undertaking, the parties are not engaged in business activities on the same market as any other party to the merger; (c) where, in the case of a merger or of acquisition of sole or joint control of another undertaking, the parties are engaged in business activities on the same market as another party to the merger but their combined market share is not 15% or more for horizontal re ...[+++]lationships and 25% or more for vertical relationships.

The framework for this operation is a network of business advisers and advisory bodies whose job it is to help small and medium-sized firms to cooperate amongst themselves in the financial, technical, commercial and sub-contracting fields. These advisers could be chambers of commerce, banks, trade organizations, sub-contracting and regional- development agencies, consultants and lawyers etc.