Some 50% to 75% of all transactions in a retail food store in Canada are by debit card. For whatever reason, Canadians are more reticent to put their food on credit cards than they are in the United States.
The debit card issue is huge for us; it's just huge. Let me explain very quickly, and we're going to be doing so in front of the Senate banking committee in a few weeks.
If right now I'm a small guy in Thunder Bay, I might be paying 5¢ per transaction, and I can handle that. If all of a sudden I have to go to a percentage, as I have done with Visa, or whatever—1.75%—the transactions I am dealing with are on the order of $200, and my costs of dealing with that transaction have all of a sudden gone up.
You'll say it's no big deal; it's the same thing for everybody. That's not so, because some of my competitors, being the major corporates, may be carrying their own credit card and may have their own access to debit card systems. Their actual cost may come down. The danger of what you're dealing with right now, of scrapping the agreement the Competition Bureau has with Interac, is exacerbated in the competitive structure, particularly in our industry.
If I had a chart here, I'd explain to you exactly how it works.