Finance committee  They do.

Finance committee  No, and I'm not suggesting that they would be negotiating with the consumer. The choice for the merchant is the negotiation with the credit card companies so that they have a choice, i.e., that they will accept the credit card but not the mobile version of that credit card, or that they will accept debit but not credit.

Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  When we talk about choice, we believe that the merchant should have full choice to choose which forms of payment they accept—

Finance committee  Yes, or that they will be willing to provide, and consumers should have the choice of what they will use to actually pay. Our concern is default payments. With mobile technology, there is the capacity for, say, Visa wallet to make sure that the card that shows up on the consumer's mobile wallet is the Visa card first, which is the highest-priced card that the merchant accepts.

Finance committee  It was well received when first introduced. It did at least provide some very limited powers to merchants at the time. We do believe it needs to be updated today with these new technologies coming in. In fact they are already in the market, and there are no protections right now for them in that regard.

Finance committee  We were disappointed. we had hoped to see some resolution to those issues. While the Competition Tribunal decided that there was something to this effect, they decided that they were not the body to actually deal with it, that it should go back to the government. We've been working hard on trying to convince the government to make additions to the code of conduct and update it to include things like allowing...or to just getting rid of honour all cards rules, even allowing some limited surcharging, not beyond, of course, what the merchants themselves pay to accept credit cards.

Finance committee  Certainly, we want to make sure that we don't see Interac, debit, and Visa, for example, on the same debit card, unless there's a distinctiveness such that one is not going to take over from the other one. We want to make sure that this stays strictly separate in terms of allowing....

Finance committee  As you may know, CFIB is a not-for-profit non-partisan organization representing more than 109,000 small and medium-size independent businesses across Canada. I will be walking you through a slide deck that I hope you have in front of you. There's no doubt that payment systems, especially credit card-specific payments, have been a touchy subject for merchants of all sizes, but especially for smaller merchants, who often feel powerless against large payment networks because they feel they have little choice but to accept the terms of payment and technology imposed on them.