BCE , the venerable Canadian telecommunications and now telecom, mobility & media conglomerate sold itself earlier this week to the Ontario Teachers Pension Fund for $48.5 billion cash.  The deal includes $16 billion in debt, preferred equity and minority interests.

This is a 42% premium over the BCE stock price of March 28, when it became known that the company was in the process of conducting an auction. Earlier last week, Telus, the western Canada telco and CDMA wireless competitor throughout Canada, declined further participation in the deal. Surely, they participated early in the process to ensure that prices were sky-high for the competitors and to get in the dealflow. Surely top executives knew that the anti-trust regulator in Canada would likely require a bust-up for overlapping units, particularly the wireless units, which would depress their 'walk-away' price. The Seaboard Group has publicly noted that Canadians pay 50% more for wireless service than Americans. Competition needs to be a little stronger, one would think…