Industry committee  You can call me at (819) 997-2209.

Industry committee  We conduct investigations all the time and we examine all complaints. However, under section 10 of the Competition Act, we have to have reasons to believe that, for example, prices are the same for gasoline. In the area of gasoline, we're talking about an identical product. So i

Industry committee  Mr. Chairman, I think the question is, if we oppose, how much of our material would be public? If we oppose and the tribunal goes to a hearing, all of it will be public except what the tribunal deems is commercially sensitive information, which will be expunged from the record by

Industry committee  They have not applied yet, so we don't know.

Industry committee  Yes. If we did oppose it, I think we'd have great difficulty in providing other than some general comments, because we would want to be able to go to the tribunal with our case and the other side not knowing what our case is. If we signalled to them what our experts say, what our

Industry committee  No. The Interac one will be in the coming weeks. A decision will be made. As to the credit cards, I think I said that in the coming weeks we'll decide on a course of action.

Industry committee  Yes, Mr. Chairman, I think that's correct. To add one thing, I think the Interac one is more about what will be the effects of changing the order and whether it will cause the order to be ineffective and lead to a concern on lessening of competition. So the order has worked; it

Industry committee  That may not be leveraging, and I would caution you that in the U.S. there are rewards on debit cards, which we have not heretofore had and we are starting to see now. When you issue rewards—air miles, tow trucks, everything, and now 1% cash back—as those rewards increase, the f

Industry committee  We're totally at arm's length. In fact, they're totally independent of us.

Industry committee  That's absolutely correct. Anybody can apply to the Competition Tribunal during the hearing to make their views known—the CFIB, the Retail Council of Canada, or any other party. The test is whether they are affected or likely to be affected by a change.

Industry committee  Yes, we have. We've also won some. It's hard to say whether we've won more than we've lost. I don't have those numbers.

Industry committee  Yes, there are two inquiries. This is something I have to say. It's under subsection 10(3) of the act. It's really important that you understand this, because we don't want to appear to be obfuscating, but section 29 and subsection 10(3) prevent us from disclosing anything when w

Industry committee  I should say that we don't just rely on complaints. In fact, some of our better cases have come from the newspapers. Say we read that some company has a large market share; we may proactively look into that. Sometimes a complainant, a small business, will come in and tell us abou

Industry committee  Mr. Chairman, I think the concern was that they would leverage their position in Canada in the credit market to force merchants to accept their debit cards in the debit market, and we would measure that by talking to merchants to see whether it's actually happening. We would also

Industry committee  I'll ask my colleague Martine to look at that. She has been charged specifically with looking at what's happening around the world.