The nuance I’d add is that while free markets are efficient, serving the public good is more important than the purest efficiency.

As an example, an unrestricted free market incentivizes the development of monopolies. This can be efficient and in the extremely long term these monopolies may fall to disruptive new entrants — but we humans live in the present and take little solace in the idea that the monopolist will someday get too bloated and fall. We just want to afford groceries!

So using competition bureau powers, we can restrict those markets. This may subtract from some extreme market efficiency but that’s an efficiency only the monopolist benefits from in a useful time frame.

The same principles are true in many other areas of the economy.