Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
To carry on with that note of shopping around, the concern that I think some of us have is that merchants shop around and they may or may not locate in this country. When they choose where to locate or when they consider their ability to grow in one jurisdiction versus another, one of the things they look at is their costs, obviously.
We had a witness here a few weeks ago, Mr. Samer Forzley of the Ottawa Centre for Regional Innovation, who said as follows:
It's very hard for small or medium-sized merchants to actually set up in Canada, and once they do, their cost for a credit card transaction is about 3.5%, which is high. Let's compare that to the U.S. As a mid-tier merchant in the U.S., I actually don't have to chase the credit card processor. What I do is go to one of the many sites and submit my volume online. They bid on my process, the way you get a mortgage here, and I get a rate. For DNA 11, I'm giving you actual data: it's 3.5% in Canada and 1.9% in the U.S. It's the same business, with the same customers. It's almost unfair. So because the price is so high just for payment transactions, they can't be competitive.
Is Mr. Forzley wrong, or should we consider this a problem in terms of people shopping around about where they're going to locate?