Some of our members would probably carry sharpened stakes and garlic, and so on. It's a hard file to kill. The issue, for us at least, is not online shopping. We're prepared to compete, and indeed our top 10 members' online sales match Amazon and eBay sales, eBay also being a member, so we're happy to compete. There was a lobby during the TPP negotiations and there is a lobby currently by the U.S. air freight industry and by online warehouses both in the U.S. and abroad to dramatically increase de minimis. Initially the ask was $200. They point out that's the U.S. level, and they kind of joke that Canada is at the same level as, I think, Uganda. What they also fail to point out is that there is no federal sales tax in the United States, so it works rather differently going the other way, and of course, they also have a lot of the warehouses there, so you can intuit reasonably who would lose sales—those investing and hiring in Canada—and who would gain sales—those shipping from outside.
The problem is that if de minimis were raised, that would strip out the tax and the duty at the border, and somebody selling a good for $100 in your riding would have to collect QST and HST while for somebody shipping it in from Albuquerque, there would be no tax. It's a basic tax fairness issue. We can live with the $20. Nobody wants to tax paperclips. It's not worth anybody's time, but $200 represents a lot of consumer goods—we estimate that to be up to $80 billion—though not all of those are shippable. Obviously, not all of those would be diverted, but we are very worried that if de minimis were increased significantly, it would lead to massive cross-border online shopping from the comfort of people's living rooms, and that is a source of great concern to Canadian merchants.