[3] It was a rather notorious piece of legislation in Canadian constitutional law for the powers it granted to non-police officers to enter private premises without a judicially-issued search warrant and seize evidence that they suspected were in relation to a violation of the Act.
This led to the Supreme Court decision in Hunter v Southam Inc where provisions of the Act were held to be inoperative in light of the recently enacted Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms' section 8 protection against unreasonable search and seizure.
[1][2][4] The primary instigator of the legislation was Nathaniel Clarke Wallace, a Conservative MP, who introduced the bill in 1888 after chairing a House of Commons committee set up to investigate combines.
[1][2] This Act defined a "combine" in the same general sense as the section 498 of the Criminal Code and simultaneously introduced the concept of a harmful "merger, trust or monopoly."
[5] The issue discovered with the two 1919 laws however was that the Board of Commerce legislation transferred power to an administrative tribunal to regulate and control practices solely on the basis of its opinion as to whether they were harmful to the community.
[2] William Lyon Mackenzie King, who had become Prime Minister in 1921, introduced new combines legislation in 1923, filling the gap left by the invalidation of the 1919 laws.
However, with the Conservative government's defeat in 1935, the new Liberal administration immediately referred the Dominion Trade and Industry Commission Act to the Supreme Court of Canada.
In 1950, the MacQuarrie Committee was appointed to review Canada's anti-combines policies and recommend such changes as would "make it a more effective instrument for the encouraging and safeguarding of our free economy.
This eventually culminated in a raid of the offices of the Edmonton Journal along with the ensuing Supreme Court decision in Hunter v Southam Inc, where provisions of the Act were held to be inoperative in light of the recently enacted Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms' section 8 protection against unreasonable search and seizure.
Kimball stated that Rocca could show how historical patterns resulted in allocations that favored Odeon and Famous Players, but not that distributors were legally required to give their first-run films to them.
Columbia was charged with violating the Combines Investigation Act and the company pled guilty on 9 June 1977, resulting in a $1,250 fine and an order to not repeat the offense.
[11] Bellevue, an American company that handled the distribution of Walt Disney films in Canada, ordered that theatres charge a minimum admission of $0,25 for all children under twelve as they were getting in for free prior to this.