Finance committee  I would start off my minute by saying I would say, quite frankly, sir, that other countries can learn an awful lot from the Canadian regulatory system and the Canadian industry. Look at the United States, it's highly fragmented. We've got a national system. I would come back to

Finance committee  I know, and thank you for the question. The Coles Notes version is that we strongly support a single securities regulator, because although it has big geography, this is a very small country. We have 13 separate regulators in this area for what is in effect a single capital mark

Finance committee  I can comment briefly, but I can also probably go on for half an hour.

Finance committee  That would be our sense as well. It makes it more efficient.

Finance committee  Yes, we'd be delighted to do that.

Finance committee  Those are really very good questions, because they go right to the heart of what the process is for clearing cheques, for instance, or what the process is for electronic payments. I'm going to turn to my colleague Karen in a moment, but we're talking here about quite a sophistic

Finance committee  This goes back to the issue that was raised earlier as well. Karen was talking about the move to reduce the cheque holding period. You're talking about online payments and so on, and it's a fair point. I think what's happening here is that the Canadian Payments Association does h

Finance committee  Do you want to take that?

Finance committee  It has a board of directors and so on, but we'll have to look into its corporate status. It's non-profit, yes.

Finance committee  Certainly. Thank you very much for that. I'll turn to my colleague Karen.

Finance committee  In fact, if I could just elaborate for a moment, 75% actually of the consumers who use bank machines are choosing to use their own machine. They avoid that fee. What we see here is—and this isn't just us talking, this is actually documented—Canada has the number one ABM system in

Finance committee  Fair enough.

Finance committee  Fair enough. In terms of process, I think the best answer is just that we have raised this issue with the department. We have worked through our technical concerns in some detail in order to have the department understand them. Our sense, sir, is that the legislation itself just

Finance committee  Yes, that's exactly right. We have been talking about this for a while. There are a couple of different elements. There are the capital rules and there are these related party rules within the Bank Act. There are tax rules. I have to say that these are thorny issues, but we are w

Finance committee  We think it is a good idea because it provides more flexibility. If you look at corporate governance rules in other parts of the economy, there's a fair amount of flexibility here. We understand, of course, that these are Canadian financial institutions and there are rules within