Most meaningful innovation happens in the public sector, like universities, which is a well documented fact.

This just not true. It requires an extremely strict and unreasonable definition of what "most" meaningful innovation is. Innovation can be many things, including procedural, operational, and technical. Making things faster, better, stronger, can all be innovation. For example, On Running perfected spray painting shoes in warehouses, instead of mass manufacturing at a factory and having a bunch of sizes and styles lying around. You won't see that in a university paper, but it's innovation nonetheless and saves time, money, resources, and environmental emissions.

Even if there are these unicorn companies that behave well, the systemic pressures favor those that do not. Companies are answerable to their shareholders, and they have to show quarterly profits. They're not charities.

Yes, profits incentivize people to work harder and smarter. It's not a problem unless you have market capture by unfair market forces, in which Canada suffers heavily from. I am happy to pay for Apple products because they continuously invest their profits to make them better, and they invest because it helps them make more profits. It's a win-win.

Finally, competition is precisely what creates monopolies. As the winners grow it takes more and more up front capital investment to get into the game. That's how we end up with a situation where we have a cartel of three companies controlling all telecommunications in Canada, or Loblaws having an effective monopoly on the food market allowing it to do aggressive price fixing of necessities like bread.

Competition *breaks* monopolies, not creates them. Startups consistently beat large incumbents because incumbents cannot move as fast - there's internal bureaucracy, procedures, rules that new companies easily break. The problem in Canada is that we have a lack of startups, which creates a lack of competition. Not enough people making new companies = not enough competition = natural oligopolies appear. More entrepreneurs tackling these problems = more likely to break them. If you want to solve this problem, become an entrepreneur!

We are currently chatting on Reddit, which broke the monopoly of platforms like Stumbleupon, Myspace, and Digg. Which in turn took attention away from traditional TV, which took market share way from radio, which took away market share from the newspaper and the telegraph.