Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the witnesses.
I am going to direct my question to Mr. Beauchamp.
Mr. Beauchamp, as obnoxious as it may be on the part of the government to throw all of these other things into the budget bill, you'd have to agree that the Competition Act has been in need of a fix for quite a while. Certainly criminally it is very difficult to obtain a conviction. You not only have to prove conspiracy but also have to prove that somehow or another it created damages. Consequently, there have been virtually no convictions under the current legislation.
The government is proposing that you don't so much have to prove the damages any more. I certainly fail to see how your body is really going to be affected under the criminal provisions. I can see how you may be more concerned with regard to the civil proceedings. Surely there is an argument to be made that consumers should be able to access real estate services on a competitive basis without there being some sort of backdoor agreement among brokers as to how much will be charged in a particular region for commissions.