The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Could Surveillance Pricing Be the Future in Ontario?

Episode Date: May 20, 2026

Is surveillance pricing reshaping what Ontarians pay, and what happens when labour protections fail the people they are meant to protect? As affordability and cost of living dominate public concern, the growing use of consumer data to tailor prices raises new questions about fairness, transparency, and oversight. We examine how this practice works, who benefits, and where safeguards may be falling short. Vass Bednar, managing director of the Canadian Shield Institute, looks at the implications of data-driven pricing and how it could affect everyday costs. We then turn to wage theft, where workers report being paid below minimum wage, paid late, or not paid at all. If these violations are not rare, what does that say about enforcement, and who is most at risk? Ghada Alsharif, immigration and work reporter for the Toronto Star, and Jared Ong, organizer with the Workers' Action Centre, discuss the scope of the problem, the barriers workers face in seeking accountability, and what stronger protections might require.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi, I'm Nam Kiwanuka, host and producer of mistreated, a podcast on women's health. There just hasn't been a lot of money put into researching women's health issues. If women are in pain, it's hysteria, it's an emotional issue. And this is what you see consistently. Women's health is not taken seriously. How did we get here? Find us wherever you get your podcasts, and be sure to check out the video version of the show on the TVO Today YouTube channel. Hope to see you then. Ontario has art for every learner and TVO wants to bring it to you. No velvet ropes, no glass cases.

There's a rich artistic history you won't find in museums and traditional archives waiting to be discovered. From film, visual art and music to beadwork, textiles and street art. These moments, movements and makers have shaped who we are. With your support, a new TVO video series will uncover Ontario's remarkable art stories and preserve them in a living public archive. Visit TVO.com slash TVO Arts to make your donation today. Your gift is matched up to $100,000. Could surveillance pricing be the future in Ontario?

That's when companies use online information about you to estimate how much you'd be willing to pay for something, meaning you might be charged more than someone else for the exact same shirt or pair of shoes or box of series. and it may end up going beyond the internet. There are worries companies will put cameras on store shelves to get clues about who you are so they can adjust price tags in real time.

Now, Ontario's opposition wants to ban surveillance pricing following Manitoba's lead, but Premier Doug Ford says no. I believe in capitalist society, free market, the market dictates. So, how can consumers protect themselves? We dig into how surveillance pricing works and how it could impact affordability. The opposition is also pressing the government to take action on wage theft.

Research shows it's a multi-million dollar problem in Ontario. We look at who's most vulnerable and what it would take to make sure workers get what they're owed. Welcome to the rundown. Affordability and cost of living are top issues for Ontarians and surveillance pricing could create a whole new set of challenges. Gada al-Sharif is an immigration and work reporter for the Toronto Star. Jared Ong is an organizer with a Workers' Action Center. Great to have you both in our studios.

Thank you so much for taking the time. I want to start off with getting a sort of better understanding of the issue of wage theft in Ontario. Jared, how would you describe it? So to me, a lot of people see wage theft as just as I was working. My boss didn't pay me for my wages. but I would see it as it's good to understand more of an expanded sense. So it's not only I was working overtime, it didn't get paid,

but it's also all the entitlements that you have, such as you were working for public holiday. You didn't get public holiday paid. You were working, you didn't get your 4% vacation pay. But it's also things such as misclassification. When an employer says, hey, you aren't actually my employee, I'm not going to contribute to your CPP. your employment insurance, and when you lose your job, you won't get termination pay.

You won't qualify for employment insurance. So wage theft is a very, I wouldn't want to broadly define it. And I also want to say the scope is very big. So in the last 10 years, about $200 million was assessed by the Ministry of Labor, stolen wages from workers' pockets. And I believe that's just a fraction of what actually was stolen, because most workers don't want to make a complaint and file in the ministry. labor. All right. Got to help us explain. Just the tip of the iceberg is sort of kind of what Jared is saying in terms of $200 million. How would you describe wage theft in this country,

or this province rather? Yeah, absolutely. So I would call it, I would say it's the tip of the iceberg from the reporting that I've done. I've spoken to labor advocates and legal experts who've called it a crisis in plain sight. The scope of it is quite massive, as Jerry, mentioned, it typically occurs among workers who are afraid to speak out, who are afraid, or maybe might not know their rights in Canada, their labor rights, and that disproportionately impacts migrant workers, newcomers to Canada, international students, people who have precarious, who are here under precarious status and who fear that they might lose that status if they make a complaint.

In your reporting experience, you have covered a number of stories. I know you can't go into this. Can you give us some examples of sort of what situation some of these workers are in? Yeah, well, it can get really complicated. So a lot of the workers I've spoken with, like I said, are working in low-wage positions. One worker I spoke with, his name is Alberto. He's from Mexico. and he came to Canada hoping to study here, to work here,

and help his mom pay for cancer treatment. And he got a job off of Kijiji, working as a CNC programmer. And his employer started delaying payments after verbally agreeing to pay him $20 an hour. And there was no reason for Alberto not to trust his employer. And over time, those payments became fewer and farther in between until they stopped altogether. And eventually he had to beg and plead with his employer to pay him just to be able to afford food.

And he had no idea what to do. He didn't know who to turn to. Again, like I said, he was here. His status was precarious. And he just, he felt very alone and devastated by the whole thing. Jared, that story doesn't surprise you. This is what you hear a lot of. What are some of the most common types?

of wage theft that you are seeing from workers who are making complaints against employers through your group? Sometimes it's very obvious, as I mentioned. It can be just be like, my employer didn't pay me, but sometimes it is very insidious, and I think the insidious parts are the most hard for people to navigate. So for example, an employer might not pay them the tips, might be taking away the tips. And it's especially tricky because a lot of tips are being pooled and then distributed. But there isn't proper records around that, for example.

And I think just to add on what Gero was mentioning, I think a lot of people feel afraid to actually speak up. A lot of people feel a bit of shame for speaking up. And sometimes payments might be delayed. You might be paid less than what you're owed, but it's a cost of living crisis. So maybe $500 is less than what you're owed. but it's better than zero if you get fired and then you have no job at all. Got it.

There is an increasing trend of subcontracting. And I want us to help understand sort of the, as we mentioned, quite complex in terms of how people are sort of being victims of this. But this subcontract adds a whole other level to it. And so I want to understand how does that make accountability more difficult? Absolutely. So it's important to note that modern business, structures really make it harder to hold accountable, to hold employers accountable.

And Ontario's labor laws are built more for that direct employer-to-employee traditional relationship. But as time goes on, we see that that is not necessarily the case for a lot of businesses. We're seeing much more, as you mentioned, companies contracting to other companies, those companies then contracting to other companies, and that creates a corporate veil, which protects the employer from any kind of, you know, accountability, or not protects, but it makes it harder to hold those employers accountable

and figure out who is responsible for the staff and responsible for paying the staff. one of the workers I interviewed for a wage theft series I did for the Toronto Star. Her name is Julietta, but she was actually hired as a cleaner for City of Toronto long-term care homes. And she thought she was being paid and hired by a company that the city of Toronto had hired. But it turns out she was actually being paid by somebody that, that, that company had hired farther down. And so when it came time for her to raise a complaint to the Ministry of Labor, it was much harder because she didn't actually know the chain of command.

And so the investigation took longer. She still hasn't gotten paid. And when I spoke to the city of Toronto, they weren't even aware that that company that they had hired had subcontracted another company. Okay. So I can already see that when workers come to you to help sort of sift through all this, There is a lot to kind of figure out who's in charge. How successful have your clients been in recovering wages owe to them?

We've been pretty successful in getting direct action and getting money back here and there. I would say sometimes even faster than the Ministry of Labor sometimes because the miniature of labor process can take up to one year from the time you actually follow a claim. But through direct action, true letters, through public pressure, we have gotten about $80,000 as I believe this year alone for workers getting money back. But I 100% agree navigating the complication of I might be working at one place, but my uniform sees a different thing. My supervisors say is a different thing.

My pay stuff says a different thing. Who is my employer? And I think the laws have not caught up with how businesses are structuring to purposely evade the law. And subcontracting is a big thing. Help me understand. You mentioned the Ministry of Labor, but the Ministry of Finance also plays a part in this, and that gets a bit confusing as well. Can you help me? Yeah, so when a worker files a claim, they file a claim through the Ministry of Labor, it takes anywhere from like six months to nine months to a year for the investigation to start and complete from the time someone is filed. But after the investigation is finished, and they say, hey, bad boss, you need to pay up. And the boss doesn't. pay up, then it gets transferred to the Ministry of Finance, to do collections and everything.

The problem is, despite $200 million being assessed as owing, about $80 million have not been recovered. Okay. So that's a lot of money out of people's pockets. And I would see it as such a big power imbalance. If I stole $5,000 from my boss very quickly, the police would come, I would get fired, they would get the money back. If my boss still $5,000 from me, it will take a year, and there's a good chance the miniature of finance will not recover that money.

At the end of the day, even when I do make a complaint, I still get fired. All right, got it. Before I get to you, I should mention that we did reach out to the Ministry of Labor and the Ministry of Finance, but we did not hear back in time of our tape. But, Godd, you wanted to add in on there? Yeah, I wanted to say, too, that in theory, once the case goes to collections under the Finance Ministry, the finance ministry can and has reached out to those employers for, you know, garnishments. They've threatened employers with seizing assets, liens.

However, in practice, it's very easy for employers to just disappear. And I noticed that in my reporting as well, where when I tried to reach out to the employers that we were investigating for the wage theft series, they either refused to respond. emails bounced back. Emails no longer existed. Addresses were, I couldn't find the addresses of the business, or they were random addresses in the suburbs. So it just showed to me how easy it is for employers

to ignore orders to pay that are issued by the Ministry of Labor. All right. There are a few mechanisms that the Ministry of Labor uses to hold employers to account. The most serious charge is what is known as a Part 3 prosecution, which involves hefty fines, jail time, and the Ministry of Labor enters the employer into a public record. I want to pull up a chart that shows the instances of Part 3 prosecutions since 2017. And you can see in 2017, 79, in 2018, 50, and I want to focus in the last five years, three out of the last five years, we're talking single digits here. Jared, what does this chart tell you about how seriously the Ontario government takes this problem?

It seems to me that although the entire government says we're going to be tough and bad employers, it's a few bad apples, we're going to make sure to deter them from doing stealing wages. In practice, although they made a stick really big, if it's a carrot and stick kind of situation, they're not really swinging for the fences very much. So they actually made a big deal about doubling the amount of maximum fines for prosecutions from $50,000 to $100,000. But if the scope, of the problem is so big and you're not actually using all the tools available, such as liens on property, assets, bank accounts being garnished, then what is the point of having all these tools if the ministry does not have the resources and the staffing to actually use all of the tools? All right. I want to talk about a new bill. Ontario introduced Bill 105 in April this year called Protecting Ontario's Workers and Economic Resilience Act 2026. Is there anything in this bill got it that will protect workers from what we have been talking about.

What's interesting about Bill 105 is that it's being introduced at a time when Ontario is facing an enforcement crisis when it comes to wage theft. The issue is that it's a lack of transparency around who decides what is vexatious. How do we decide what is vexatious? So the fact that we're getting rid of that transparency at a time when, you know, as Jared said, millions of dollars are still owed, the bill will give the Ministry of Labor power to refuse to investigate wage theft claims that have come forward. You know, we're already, we're still facing this problem, I think says a lot about what this bill will do to protect workers. Jared? It's a bit like the twilight zone where advocates, organizers, journalists tell the government, we wish that you would do

something about the backlog. Workers cannot wait one year. And they twist the wish by doing, listen, to deal with the backlog, we're not going to investigate our cases in case they're vexatious, in case they are, we're just going to inspect some cases. And one of the reasons they stated was lack of evidence. We won't investigate cases due to lack of evidence. But we know that employers are very good at hiding evidence. They would send you all the schedules by WhatsApp. They'll delete the WhatsApp messages. Maybe you have a company email where you kept all your records. Once you leave the job, they delete your Gmail account.

You don't have access anymore. You try to find employers by calling them emailing, they disappear. So if evidence and the lack of evidence is the reason why they want to not investigate your case, then that is a very twisted way the government is trying to deal with the backlog. With that being said, Jared, what policy changes would have a meaningful result to protect workers from wage theft. So for me, they're like three main things, right? If I could sum it up, I would say, one, actually enforce the law,

use all the tools necessary to actually get the money back. Two, I would say close the loopholes so that misclassification doesn't happen for workers. And subcontractors, franchises, temp agencies are all jointly and several liability. And the third thing I would say is protect workers that actually. actually stand up for their rights. Right now, if you stand up for your rights, you're going to get fired. You're going to get punished. You're always going to be in cut. So on paper, reprisals are illegal. In practice, you're going to get fired anyway, and you're going to take one year to actually push back. So that is the three policy solutions that I would suggest. We are going to have to

leave it there. But Jared, Goda, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me about this. Very important story. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. What happens if your boss pays you less than minimum wage or pays you late or doesn't pay you at all? Data suggests that's not rare in Ontario. Vass Bednar is managing director of the Canadian Shield Institute and she joins me in studio. How are you doing, Wes? I'm good. How are you? I am doing well. Let us talk about surveillance pricing.

What exactly is it and where do Canadians experience it? Surveillance pricing occurs most of the time when you're shopping online. So in a closed ecosystem, you're either on your computer or you're in an app. It's much harder to comparison shop. And what's happening is that the price you're seeing has been calibrated for you based on a range of inferences that the company is making about you, based on personal characteristics, personal data, and some of your behavior online. When I think of surveillance pricing, I'm thinking, and help me define this.

I think of dynamic pricing, like an airplane, Uber on a very busy, you know, game date. Is that different than certain? There's some distinctions, for sure. There's some distinctions. So, I mean, with airlines, I think it's an interesting site to think about because for a long time, we grew comfortable with price fluctuations that were observable. But those were mostly due to supply and demand constraints and then the function of time, right? You're booking far in advance.

You might find a better deal. There's some evidence that up to a thousand different data points are now, use to calibrate the price that you see when you book your airline. So that's a new dimension, right? That's being supercharged by data. And sometimes a lot of that data has been willingly volunteered by us when we're engaging in loyalty programs that also share our purchase history. So you're absolutely right that there's distinctions between supply and demand constraints influencing price as well, you know, with food, geopolitical pressures. There's a lot that goes into a firm pricing something. But again, increasingly we're seeing with experiments

the same people, like in the same geography, shopping at the same store online, are being served different prices and a kind of price. I'll use the term experiment, because it ultimately is an experiment. A bunch of red flags are going up for me as things that you're saying. So help me understand what personal data specifically.

Are we talking about how long I'm spending on a website? I recently purchased some dining chairs, and I was very upset at what I saw in terms of the price initially. And then I kept revisiting it. it over and over and over again, much higher than what it was. After I bought it, it went on sale. Is this, like, some of the examples that people are sort of dealing with when it comes to that? What are the sort of triggers of the data points? You mentioned a thousand different things here. I mean, it could be some of your past purchase history. Have you purchased with that furniture

retail multiple times before, right? Or can they sort of count on that purchase? Will that purchase happen quickly? It could be based on them inferring, your gender, your race, your level of education, the geography in which you live, and kind of the socioeconomic status of that neighborhood, those are some of the elements that are being used. So it's quite different from how prices varied before. There's always been price variance in markets too. So again, that's not net new, but the how firms are able to do this

and how granular, even discounting can be. Because I'm glad you mentioned, you know, something. going on discount later. Sometimes that's because it's like, oh, he's coming to the site and gazing at this. He's putting it in his cart and he's not returning. So let's serve him a personalized discount to just sort of tip him over into making that purchase. I feel like a bit of a victim. I want to see the chairs.

They're lovely. I'll show you after. But help me understand. Can a consumer know for sure that he or she is being targeted to pay a higher price? It's very difficult. So one, you have to kind of get in the fine print of privacy policies. We also have weak federal privacy laws in Canada that allow and sort of facilitate some of this. The challenge with federal privacy laws that we, through that law, conceive of the associated harms as being individualized.

But a lot of the time, the harms that we're experiencing when we're being profiled for pricing, cluster us into groups. We are segmented or our data is de-anonymized, but we're segmented into, kind of subsets or groups. In terms of where we know it's happening, a lot of the Canadian commentary so far relies on great and recent research that's taken place in the U.S.

So it's being demonstrated by Amazon, by Instacart. Walmart holds patents for this, which is a reminder. Yeah, some companies would like to make the ability to gouge us proprietary. And I think that when some of the largest retailers are doing this kind of out in the office, open and setting a new norm, we should expect that other firms follow. I've looked at some Canadian

software companies that purport to do this, right? They advertise that they can do this. And when we look at this kind of on the horizon, the potential future of e-commerce, I don't know if you'd let a chatbot shop for you. I kind of like shopping when I'm able to do it. But in these systems, it's actually encoded the ability to personalize that kind of price for the individual. So it's an interesting, there's interesting potential in that you think you could code your chatbot to sort of say, find me the best deal on these dining room chairs. But really that chatbot is also being incentivized by ads to upsell you or tell you that this is the best possible price. And it's kind of not.

So it's quite murky. You don't represent any of these businesses and companies. But I'm hoping you can understand a little bit. Where are they coming from? Where did they see the benefits to consumers? Or is it really just the bottom line here for them? So it is a practice that it's not like pay what you can. It is something that's fundamentally about extracting the maximum possible price from people.

When I put my sort of efficiency business hat on, I can see the argument that is occasionally made that says that's our job. Our job is to maximize the profit we're able to make. And we should use as much information as is possible. to be as calibrated and granular when we're experimenting. I understand that, but I also think that discriminating against people based on their personal characteristics is too much and goes too far. You know, the kind of information firms are able to use to, again, I'll say run those pricing experiments because that's what it is.

And like the best subjects, we're not aware that we're being subject to it. they're not in a rush to tell us that they're doing it. And I think that says a lot. Because every time, or many times when a firm has been discovered to be doing this, so PlayStation was running an experiment where video gamers who played more often were seeing a higher price for a game. Wow. You think people aren't going to share in forums like what price? And they stopped.

They said, oh, you know, we're just trying something, just checking it out. Okay, if you're telling people you're doing that, that's how they respond. It's not a good relationship, and it's kind of a breakdown of trust. Well, I mean, I'm going to ask the question. I think I know the answer here. Not illegal in terms of what they're doing right now. Is that correct? I mean, look, let's look at Quebec's privacy law, 25, says you cannot use people's personal information and data to discriminate against them.

Now, that law has not yet been tested in an algorithmic pricing context. If you're someone like me and you read the fine print of the Telecommunications Act, I will say we have precedent in telecommunications that says you cannot charge different people different prices, which makes sense because a lot of price variations started geographically. So when we're all paying for internet or cell phones, you're not going to upcharge. We actually have law that says you can't charge people in Rosdale, Toronto more because they can pay. Well, if that's a value that we have as Canadians, that's not something we've sort of being able to have a public conversation about

or sort of enshrine in our public policy. And I think we're in this like interesting, yeah. Well, with that being said, we'll go from Quebec, let's go to Ontario. Yes. Ford has said that Ontario will not introduce a ban on surveillance pricing. Yeah. One province already has, Manitoba. Tell me what are they doing and how does it protect consumers?

So Manitoba is defining this as a consumer protection. problem, which is really interesting. We live in a federation. I was mentioning a federal privacy law. Push that aside. Manitoba's using this lever. And they're saying that it's unacceptable in sort of any context. They're anchoring their work in grocery specifically. And it'll be interesting to see how they're able to enforce that ban.

The tricky thing with bands is they don't necessarily change everything overnight. But I agree with Premier Ford in that. that I also want a more free and fair market, but I disagree that personalized algorithmic pricing is a free market. When you and I can't really know about it and we're being deceived and kind of all that consumer surplus is being extracted, that's not a free market. That's just really good deception.

There's also Canada's Competition Bureau as well. So for people who are not familiar, independently law enforcement agency, that is to protect and promote competition for consumers. but also businesses. Any interest in them sort of watching surveillance and police and sort of policing that? I'm interested. It feels like a bit more of a downstream kind of market policing, but we do have, again, parts of the Competition Act like double ticketing. You're not supposed to have like two competing prices in a particular way. I know that the Competition Bureau also cares a lot about fake discounting. Like fake discounting is a big way that a lot of us get served these pricing experiments. You know, it says that that dining room chair is

$100, but it's actually never retailed for $100. And then all of us are seeing prices underneath it. So, look, I'd love to see a private action case taken to the competition tribunal and sort of tested there. And I know the Competition Bureau studied it a little bit, probably part of the solution for Canada, but not what's going to revolutionize marketplaces and bring the transparency we need. Any steps consumers can do to protect themselves?

You know, I'm always reluctant to give people advice just because, you know, just because, I don't think it's incumbent on us as individuals to sort of fight structural market power things like one by one. However, there are, you know, with Amazon, there are certain web plugins that give you an alert when a price hits a certain threshold, which I think is also a tacit acknowledgement of the randomized pricing. People sometimes recommend, including a company in the U.S. that does surveillance pricing. I believe it was Delta Airlines on Twitter, advise somebody just using Cognito-Mars. Look, for now, we could all go incognito and sort of hope for the best and not participate in loyalty programs and try to pay with cash where we can, but it's not going to change the core problem. Again, this is currently encoded in e-commerce. It is part of Google's terms of service with advertisers when they're serving prices.

It's hiding in plain sight, and I think we're in such an interesting moment for Canada to start to react. Well, we are going to continue to follow this. I really appreciate your time and your insights on this. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. I'm Jay-N. Thanks for watching The Rundown. So do you think companies should be allowed to use surveillance pricing? Well, let us know. Email us at rundown at tv.org. Or as always, you can leave us a comment on our YouTube page. Until then, I will see you tomorrow.

If you're enjoying this series, please consider supporting TVO with a donation to make more insightful and thought-provoking podcast possible. TVO is a registered charity and you will receive a tax receipt for your gift. Visit TVO.org slash give TVO to make your donation today.