Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.
Good afternoon everyone.
Welcome to the ninth meeting of the parliamentary Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology. We're dealing with e-commerce and electronic payments.
We have four witnesses before us today.
Before I introduce the witnesses, I'll do a bit of committee business ever so briefly.
I need a motion from the floor for our budget for this study. Right now we're going to budget $8,450 for it. There's no guarantee that we will actually have to spend that much, but we need to make sure that we budget this amount in order to deal with expenditures for witnesses.
Could I have a member make a motion in that regard?
Thank you, Mr. Braid.
Seconded by Mr. Thibeault.
All in favour?
(Motion agreed to)
Thank you very much.
Now I will introduce the witnesses. We have from the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association, Bernard Lord, the president and chief executive officer; from KPMG, we have Ken Cochrane, a partner in advisory management consulting; from IBM, we have Chris Paterson, director of government programs; and from Microsoft Canada Inc., we have John Weigelt, the national technology officer.
Gentlemen, we'll give you six minutes for your opening comments and then we'll go to a regular rotation of questions. I'll follow the order that's before us in our orders of the day, so we'll begin with Mr. Lord.