Perhaps with Mr. Protti, I would like to get back to the issue of the cost of transactions and the link between the price and the cost of the transaction. Citizens in my riding often talk to us about bank fees, because it's something very concrete in their daily lives. We understand that there are fees when you go to an ATM, but most of these fees are fixed: the rental of the room, the purchase of the equipment and the design of software to handle all this. The variable part, which includes among other things handling of envelopes, seems to me to be quite marginal on the whole. Therefore, in practice, whether you have 1,000 transactions a day at an ATM or 100, the cost of that ATM is quite stable and can vary very little according to the number of transactions. That being the case, why are the transaction fees much higher for someone who withdraws $20 five times?
On March 22nd, 2007. See this statement in context.