Can the Competition Bureau restart the merger-review clock with a supplementary information request?

What the additional-information request actually resets

Section 114(2) reads: “The Commissioner or a person authorized by the Commissioner may, within 30 days after receiving the prescribed information, send a notice to the person who supplied the information requiring them to supply additional information that is relevant to the Commissioner's assessment of the proposed transaction.” Section 123(1)(b) then measures the fresh 30-day waiting period from “the day on which the information required under subsection 114(2) has been received by the Commissioner” — not from the original filing date.

Section 116 is a way off the clock, not just a delay

Section 116(1) allows a party to respond under oath instead of producing information that is “not known or reasonably obtainable, or cannot be supplied because of … privilege … or … confidentiality,” and s.116(2) does the same where information “could not, on any reasonable basis, be considered to be relevant to an assessment by the Commissioner as to whether the proposed transaction would … prevent or lessen competition substantially.” Section 116(3) gives the Commissioner a hard deadline to push back: if the Commissioner “notifies that entity or individual, within seven days after the Commissioner is so informed, that the information is required,” only then must it actually be produced. Swearing to a relevance objection, rather than compiling years of records that have nothing to do with where the parties actually compete, can take real time off the review.

Where this plays out in the Case Files

• • A relevance oath under s.116 that took nine weeks off the clock, where producing everything requested would have taken months

Sources

• • Competition Act s.114(2) — the supplementary information request. Fetched and confirmed against the marginal note “Additional information.”
• • Competition Act s.123(1)(b) — the waiting period restart measured from receipt of the s.114(2) information.
• • Competition Act s.116 — s.116(1)/(2) the relevance and privilege oath, s.116(3) the Commissioner's seven-day window to insist on production anyway.
• • No Treadstone Law page addresses supplementary information requests or the s.116 relevance mechanism under the Competition Act. Treadstone Law's published coverage is general Ontario business and corporate law and does not reach this federal mechanism, so none of its pages is cited here rather than force an adjacent link that does not genuinely cover the topic.