Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
It is our association's pleasure to be able to join you today and talk about e-commerce in Canada, given the key role the retail sector plays in this area. We hope that our presentation, our comments and our recommendations will be positively received.
The Retail Council of Canada has provided you with a detailed presentation. But because of time constraints, I suggest that we go over the main findings and our recommendations. I will be happy to answer your questions during the question period.
The presentation we sent looks like this. Probably you have a copy in black and white. That would include most of the statistics, but I will, as I said in French, simply summarize some of the findings.
I'd like to direct your attention to page 6 in English and 7 in French, specifically to give you a sense of the size of the sector. Often when we present before committees the retail sector is not as well understood in relation to the contribution it makes to the overall economy. As you can see on top of page 6, we talk about the retail sector investing close to $6 billion in machinery and equipment, which included $1.6 billion in information and communication technology in 2008 alone. I thought that was an important point to make in relation to the discussion we're having today.
I would also encourage you to look at pages 8 and 9 of the presentation, which speaks specifically to e-commerce retail sales in Canada. As noted at the beginning of this deck, the Retail Council did a fairly extensive study of the retail market.