The Document Gish Gallop: How Corporations Bury Accountability in Paperwork
An analysis of the Competition Bureau’s case against Rogers reveals a common strategy of overwhelming regulators, and what it means for public transparency.
On October 3, 2025, a set of documents was filed with the Competition Tribunal of Canada. On the surface, they were standard procedural filings in a case between the Commissioner of Competition and Rogers Communications Inc. concerning allegations of false advertising. The case itself, CT-2024-012, revolves around whether Rogers misled Canadians by advertising its “Infinite” wireless plans as unlimited when they are, in fact, subject to significant speed reductions after a certain data cap. This is an important issue. But hidden within the administrative bulk of the motion records is a far more significant story. It is not about the details of data throttling, but about the very mechanics of accountability in modern governance.
These filings reveal a common corporate tactic for managing regulatory challenges. It is a strategy of strategic obfuscation, one designed to overwhelm and exhaust the public’s capacity for oversight. This tactic is so pervasive, yet so rarely named, that it allows complex issues of public interest to fade into a haze of procedural complexity, leaving engaged citizens feeling frustrated and powerless. To restore your sense of agency, you need to understand the game being played.
A Mountain of Digital Paper
Your first encounter with the source material for this case is disorienting. The public motion record from Rogers is hundreds of pages long, referencing dozens of exhibits labeled A through Z. One of these, Exhibit W, is the Commissioner of Competition’s own “Affidavit of Documents”. This single exhibit is where the real story begins. It is not a document in the traditional sense, but a list of other documents. Thousands of them.
As you scroll through the pages, you are confronted with a seemingly endless list of files. There are emails, JPG images, PowerPoint presentations, and video files. You see entries like:
RGKA00001_000007925, 6/10/2021, Ignite TV Infinite Verbatims 20210610.xlsx
RGKA00001_000000007, 10/23/2023, Converged Value Prop
RBMK00041_000000005, 3/28/2022, 2022-03-28-Rogers Unlimited Phones Plans Purchase Flow.mp4
This is the core problem you, as an engaged citizen, face. You have access to the primary sources, but they are presented as an undifferentiated mountain of data. There are more than fifteen thousand items listed in these schedules. Some are mundane screen recordings of a website. Others are massive spreadsheets filled with raw consumer feedback. Somewhere in this mountain, there might be a “smoking gun” email or a damning internal report. But finding it is a task worthy of a large, well-funded team of forensic accountants, not a time-poor citizen trying to stay informed. The sheer volume creates a barrier to entry, transforming transparency into a form of opacity.
The ‘Document Gish Gallop’ in Action
To make sense of this, we need a memorable analogy. I call this tactic the Document Gish Gallop. In debate, a “Gish Gallop” is a technique where a debater overwhelms an opponent by spewing a torrent of misleading arguments, half-truths, and irrelevant facts. The opponent cannot possibly rebut every point in the time allotted, making them appear unable to defend their position.
The Document Gish Gallop is the corporate, procedural equivalent of this. It is the practice of responding to a regulator’s request for information by burying them in a digital avalanche. It creates an illusion of transparency and cooperation while simultaneously making the task of finding relevant information nearly impossible. It is a procedural filibuster conducted with terabytes of data instead of long speeches.
The evidence for this is right there in the file lists. In the schedules attached to the affidavits, you can see the gallop in full stride. There are thousands of routine files, such as screen recordings of purchase flows from 2022 and 2023, mixed in with potentially crucial internal presentations and spreadsheets with names like “Ignite TV Infinite Verbatims”. By producing this enormous volume of information, a corporation can claim it has complied with its disclosure obligations. But the signal is lost in the noise. This points to a critical question: is the goal of this disclosure to reveal the truth or to make finding it as difficult as possible? The Document Gish Gallop suggests the latter. It is a feature, not a bug, of a system where overwhelming your opponent with information is a viable legal strategy.
Information Asymmetry and the Illusion of Transparency
Here is the detail I find most revealing. This entire process is built on a foundation of information asymmetry. Rogers, like any large corporation, has near-perfect knowledge of its own internal records. It knows which presentations contain sensitive information, which emails reveal internal debates about marketing language, and which spreadsheets detail the profitability of “Speed Passes” sold to customers who have been throttled. The Commissioner of Competition, and by extension the public, does not.
Regulators must sift through this mountain of data from a position of profound informational disadvantage. This is not a failure of the individuals at the Competition Bureau. It is a systemic imbalance of power. A corporation can deploy immense resources to produce and organize its disclosure in a way that is technically compliant but practically obstructive.
True transparency is not achieved by opening a firehose of raw data. It is achieved by providing clear, concise, and understandable answers to direct questions. The Document Gish Gallop subverts this principle. It allows a sophisticated legal entity to feign openness while hoarding the most valuable resource of all: context. It creates an illusion of transparency that frustrates accountability and erodes public trust in the regulatory process. By turning the search for a needle into a search through a thousand haystacks, the powerful ensure that, most of the time, the needle is never found.
Clarity is the Precursor to Accountability
The frustration you feel when faced with thousands of pages of legal filings is not a personal failing. It is a systemic one. The system of public disclosure in regulatory cases is often not designed for clarity but for the appearance of it. What you need is not more data, but a framework for understanding the tactics being used to obscure the truth. By recognizing the Document Gish Gallop, you move from a state of frustration to one of agency. You can now see the strategy for what it is, a procedural power play designed to exhaust and overwhelm. True civic power does not come from having access to every file, but from understanding the games being played with them. Accountability is not found in the volume of paper, but in the clarity of the answers.
Sources:
Competition Tribunal. (2025). Motion Record of the Respondent, CT-2024-012.
Competition Tribunal. (2025). Affidavit of Documents of the Commissioner of Competition, Exhibit W to the Affidavit of Ashley McKnight, CT-2024-012.