Again, I think it's a great idea, but I don't think it's a great idea for the reasons you may think. I don't think it's a great idea to allocate a chunk of money to encourage Canadian small businesses to move online. What I do like about it is that there's a program in place that inspires these people and shows them these case studies.
The only reason I sent these four shops out to members of this committee was to explain that these are four very different shops, all with the same course of action: they have used technology to advance their business. The problem is that 95% of retail in Canada is still happening offline—which is only decreasing—and our adoption of online retail in Canada is actually pretty slow. What I like about the program is not that they've allocated funding in order to support this program, but that they're going ahead and proactively going to small businesses and saying, “The future of retail looks very different. We, as a government, are going to give you the tools and resources to help you make that transition”. The Government of Ireland is partnering with Shopify, an Ottawa-based Canadian company. We'd love to do that here at home.
I mentioned earlier, sir, that one of the big reasons Canadians consumers don't like shopping online is shipping prices. I think we can be doing a much better job here. It's fairly ridiculous that it's cheaper for me to purchase an item from California and have it shipped to Ottawa than it is to have it shipped from Vancouver. Zappos, a very iconic retailer now owned by Amazon, pulled out Canada solely because shipping prices made it almost prohibitive for them to do free shipping—which is now a standard industry practice.
What they've done in Ireland is pretty good, but I think we can probably do better here in Canada. We're smarter than they are. But I think that inspiring and educating is something we have to do.