The reasons for price differentials between Canada and the U.S. are many. Some of them are fairly straightforward economies of scale and population that you would expect to see. Some of them are a rather poor practice called country pricing, in which Canadians are charged either via a wholesaler or a distributor at a higher rate simply because the market will bear more in Canada. The Senate actually spoke to this at length, and indeed, then minister Flaherty indicated he was planning to address the issue in a budget. I think it was three budgets ago. The challenge, of course, is how you address that, because you can't attach a penalty to the goods or else you exacerbate the problem. For a lot of entities that were charging Canadians more, that don't have a permanent establishment in Canada, it was exceedingly difficult to think about a way to address that. That's been a big part of it.
The retail pot is about $500 billion, but about $100 billion of that is auto, which has a very strictly controlled environment; about $50 billion is gas station sales. We tend not to look at them in the same way. They tend to be vertically integrated companies. Everybody is tracking that pretty tightly. Of the rest, we have about $100 billion in the grocery area. When you pare it down all the way, in consumer goods you're getting into about the $220-billion zone. When you think about $4.5 billion of tariffs, it is, on average, 2%, but of course it falls differentially from product to product, and in some cases actually outstrips all of the sales taxes, both federal and provincial, that are collected. It's a disparate impact, depending upon the item. Of course, some items are exempt or have very low tariff rates.
Did that address the question you were asking?