I'm happy to go first, if that's okay.
Historically, the direct selling industry was people either going door to door selling things or selling things via home parties, those sorts of things. Over the last 10 to 20 years it's definitely evolved into more of a digital business. That obviously has sped up very quickly due to COVID-19. Basically, for all of our member companies now, doing home parties is not a thing. They're doing all their selling...whether it's apps or desktops. They're taking and sending orders, doing customer service, tracking orders. If they don't have access to good and affordable Internet, then that basically takes away that opportunity from most people.
I live in Toronto and I have enough trouble with Internet on a lot of days. I can only imagine what it's like if you're still on dial-up or on a lower level of Internet. I was speaking to a rep from Avon earlier this week. She works in a lot of indigenous communities in B.C. She said it's basically impossible to do business there both from an order-taking perspective but also in terms of payments because they do all of them now through digital banking, and even that becomes very hard. It's definitely a challenge, and much more so in rural areas and for people in the community who are older and still want to make some income through something like direct selling but do not have the requisite digital skills to be able to do that.
I think there's a huge opportunity in terms of economic activity being lost. It needs to be seen as an investment rather than a cost.