There are a few things we have publicly asked Minister Flaherty for. One is to ensure that the issues under review by the Competition Bureau are codified. The Competition Bureau is asking to allow firms to refuse to accept certain cards if they don't like the price. It will also allow them to surcharge for accepting a credit card.
These are powers that would be seldom used by small business. But they would be important in pushing back against the tidal wave of fees that small and medium-sized firms have experienced over the last couple of years. These are powers that the Competition Bureau has said are anti-competitive on the part of VISA and MasterCard, and it is taking them to the Competition Tribunal on that. We're asking for those to be codified. We're also asking for some better dispute settlement processes in the code.
As to the whole e-commerce field, though, the code doesn't speak terribly loudly about mobile technologies. I think we need some additional provisions to ensure that we can offer mobile technologies compliant with the code. There are easy ways to make that happen. We're not suggesting for a second that anyone needs to carry multiple cellphones to be able to make different types of mobile payments. These things can happen. Our concern was about the attempts of VISA and MasterCard to piggyback on Interac's debit card network across Canada, to use it to expand their marketplace.
The most important provision is that VISA and MasterCard need to go out there, as PayPal has done, and try to convince individual merchants and consumers of the benefits of their model. If that's happening, we're happy. But under the earlier VISA and MasterCard proposals on debit, even with online debit, as happened with VISA and CIBC, there were some provisions that didn't allow that to happen.