Absolutely. It was not just members, I might add. We have 6.8 million members, but when we do polling, we poll all Canadians. We ask them whether they are members so we know what the difference is, if there is one, but there isn't on this issue. Over two-thirds of Canadians support the right of the independent repair industry, through garages, to have access to that software.
Again, you'll hear differing stories about how easy that access is and how complete that access is today. In our view, the bill before you is ensuring that we don't have another impediment, and it's about ensuring that in the future, digital locks don't become an impediment.
To the point made by Monsieur Généreux, the industry is getting tighter and tighter and tougher and tougher and more technologically driven. The importance to the OEMs of the repair model, and therefore that software, is only going to grow with time.
We already see that when new manufacturers come along, like Tesla, they don't use dealerships. They're company owned. That's been a long-term trend in the industry. I think it would be fair to say that if the OEMs were creating the industry from scratch today, they wouldn't set up independent dealer networks that they end up getting, you know.....
One of the things they love about wireless transmission of data is that it allows them, for the first time ever, to establish a direct binary relationship with the owner of a vehicle. If you think about it, I would suggest that if it's a new vehicle, most of us have a relationship with a dealership, and if not, then with a garage, but not with the OEM itself.
That's partly what this is about, this brave new world for the manufacturers. We think their pressure to hold that data will only increase. We want to make sure that it's more widely available, as we said, to the benefit of consumers, in particular on price when it comes to repair.