Senior Bank of Canada official calls for more competition in banking

A senior official at the Bank of Canada is calling for more competition in the banking sector to better serve Canadians and the economy.

Senior deputy governor Carolyn Rogers laid out her case for a more competitive Canada in a speech at the Canadian Club in Toronto on Thursday morning.

Rogers sounded the alarm in a speech last year on Canada’s productivity crisis, arguing that as business investment levels flagged, the resilience of the economy and Canadians’ quality of life were at risk.

On Thursday, she said that issue took on greater urgency when the United States launched its trade war earlier this year.

A more productive economy is better equipped to handle that shock, Rogers argued, and competition is a path to productivity.

“Higher productivity won’t make Canada immune to U.S. trade policy, but it would help buffer the effect of tariffs,” she said in prepared remarks.

Dropping interprovincial trade barriers is a start to boosting competition, but Rogers said Canada needs “to think bigger than that.”

Rogers focused her speech on the banking sector, which she said is accurately described as an oligopoly – an industry dominated by just a few main players.

The supremacy of Canada’s Big Six banks has offered stability to the financial sector, she acknowledged, and the profitability of their operations has made those institutions less likely to take major risks with Canadians’ money.

But Rogers said there are trade-offs to both promoting too much competition and keeping industries too insulated from outside forces.

The more firms compete, the harder they’ll work to innovate, which Rogers said will drive down prices for Canadians while boosting the economy.

“Greater contestability, more new entrants and more innovation in our financial sector would lead to competition that’s good for consumers, for productivity and for our economy,” she said. “We should lean into it.”

Rogers pointed to the development of an open banking framework – a concept endorsed by Ottawa that sees consumers take more control over their own financial data, making it easier to switch banks – as one path toward more competition in the sector.

A forthcoming plan to switch to a real-time payments system in Canada that would allow smaller firms to cut out big banks as a middleman in their services would also help boost competition, she said.

Rogers said policy-makers must strike the right balance of strong competition law in a mix with appropriate levels of regulation and incentives to spur long-needed boosts in productivity.

Industry Minister Mélanie Joly said in a speech at Canada’s annual Competition Summit last week the federal government will be “hawkish” on competition as Ottawa seeks to build a more resilient economy in the face of U.S. tariffs.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 9, 2025.