Yes, I noticed that. During the summer, the TMX Select ATS was getting much higher volume than usual as well.
I've always felt the ATS'es were just one more way for the big boys to hide behind and put retail investors at a disadvantage. How many online brokers in Canada offer a transparent bid/ask/vloume data feed to their retail customers for no additional cost? I don't know of any.
But on many days over 30% of the total Canadian volume on any given stock would "disappear" into the ATS tickers. Is that a fair and transparent marketplace? Is this a rhetorical question?
Case in point. On 8/25, Poet had total volume across all Canadian feeds of about 3.8 million. The TMX Select ATS processed over 1 million of that volume.
