Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Governor, Senior Deputy Governor, thank you for coming today.
I am going to move away from the big economic issues now and bring you into my beautiful riding of Beauport—Limoilou. Last October, I organized, along with my colleagues in the Quebec City region, a forum on credit card costs. As you know, for about five or six years now, there has been an unbelievable explosion of credit cards and other types of cards, such as reward cards. It is a problem that is hitting retailers generally at various levels. Even Walmart reacted to this in the United States.
Let's talk about the Canadian situation. Let's be frank, our retailers' hands are tied. For any one credit card company, they do not have a choice. If they want to provide Visa transactions, for example, then they have to accept all cards under that brand. Our retailers are telling us that this is a very serious problem. It is very hard for them to do any forecasting for the purposes of making a reasonable profit.
Do you think that this is a major problem? Do you think that this is an actual transfer of wealth from small retailers and the public in general to a financial sector that is less tied to the economy?