Thank you, Chair.
Mr. Stanton, what has precipitated these hearings is some pretty unilateral action on the part of your company and Visa in hiking rates in economically difficult times, when margins and business activity are shrinking. You couldn't have picked a worse time to hike rates. I have a document here prepared by a who's who of retail merchants in Canada. It says that in October, rates for electronic cards were 1.68%, as they were for standard cards. Then it gives a breakdown of post-October rates, and it says that Visa and MasterCard have since averaged increases of 11.5% and as high as 17%.
You can appreciate that when a hotel merchant or gasoline merchant who is on a fixed margin has increases such as these in a very short period of time, and over which he has no ability to respond, it's going to get his attention. What do you say to these folks?