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Manitoba Moves Against Retailers Charging Different Prices for the Same Goods

The bill would outlaw using personal data to determine what customers pay—a first in Canada

Vass Bednar writes sharp, accessible articles about how markets actually work—who benefits, who doesn’t, and why competition laws (when they exist) shape everyday life more than we realize. She has a knack for making boring topics—like interprovincial trade—surprising and urgent, and unlike a lot of policy experts, she isn’t afraid to let her frustration show (“How fit for purpose is government labour data today? Not very. The data sucks”).

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Bednar is also managing director at a think tank called the Canadian Shield Institute, where she and her team spend a lot of time thinking about how to defend our economic sovereignty in an era of shifting global power (their newsletter is well worth subscribing to).

What ties all of this together is Bednar’s instinct for where regulatory debates are heading before they break into the open. And so it was interesting to see, weeks after her article for us on “algorithmic” or personalized pricing, the Manitoba government propose legislation banning retailers from using customers’ personal data to charge them different prices for the same goods.

I wanted to get Bednar’s thoughts on Manitoba’s move and if this signals a shift in how governments are starting to understand the hidden mechanics of digital markets.

Tell me why this is a big deal. Provincial governments introduce legislation all the time.

Manitoba is the first government in Canada to recognize and address the potential issues with pricing algorithms that use your data against you. A few US states have started moving, but this is a wide-open policy space in Canada. Manitoba is setting the terms of this debate early, instead of waiting until personalized pricing is everywhere and politically untouchable.

Normalization is a real risk here. Once firms get consumers used to being sorted, profiled, and priced differently, the practice starts to feel inevitable. But it is not. It is a choice about what kind of business practices we expect. Personalized algorithmic pricing pulls together affordability, privacy, competition, consumer protection, and data extraction all at once. It asks whether companies should be allowed to use increasingly intimate signals about our behaviour to decide what we see, what we pay, and what discounts we never even knew existed.

In a cost-of-living crisis, that really........

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