Finance committee  As you may know, CFIB is a not-for-profit non-partisan organization representing more than 109,000 small and medium-size independent businesses across Canada. I will be walking you through a slide deck that I hope you have in front of you. There's no doubt that payment systems,

Finance committee  We were disappointed. we had hoped to see some resolution to those issues. While the Competition Tribunal decided that there was something to this effect, they decided that they were not the body to actually deal with it, that it should go back to the government. We've been wor

Finance committee  Certainly, we want to make sure that we don't see Interac, debit, and Visa, for example, on the same debit card, unless there's a distinctiveness such that one is not going to take over from the other one. We want to make sure that this stays strictly separate in terms of allowin

Finance committee  It was well received when first introduced. It did at least provide some very limited powers to merchants at the time. We do believe it needs to be updated today with these new technologies coming in. In fact they are already in the market, and there are no protections right now

Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  When we talk about choice, we believe that the merchant should have full choice to choose which forms of payment they accept—

Finance committee  Yes, or that they will be willing to provide, and consumers should have the choice of what they will use to actually pay. Our concern is default payments. With mobile technology, there is the capacity for, say, Visa wallet to make sure that the card that shows up on the consume

Finance committee  They do.

Finance committee  No, and I'm not suggesting that they would be negotiating with the consumer. The choice for the merchant is the negotiation with the credit card companies so that they have a choice, i.e., that they will accept the credit card but not the mobile version of that credit card, or th

Finance committee  Yes, certainly I think there is a lot of fear, given what we saw with premium cards initially in 2008. Now that we have another player entering the mix, a telecommunications company, we know that's how they are making their piece of the pie. Right now, our understanding is that's

Finance committee  Yes, and history has shown us that.... We've seen this play before, and I think the trust is not there that this will not happen in the future, so we want to make sure the protections are in place.

Finance committee  That's an excellent question. Not only is the business-to-business part slow in developing, but so are the business-to-government and government-to-business parts. Perhaps government can play a role in building a system within payments to government that can help spearhead or dri

Finance committee  The typical one right now is that you pay your bills online, right? You can pay your electricity bill and all of that online. A lot of small businesses would love to have that as an option so that they can pay each other, but to set up a system like that is very expensive for a s

Finance committee  Yes. We recently did some work around the payments system. We have a whole report around Canadian payments and small businesses. One of the questions we asked was what the biggest obstacles were for merchants in accepting or receiving electronic payments. Number one was cost. I

Finance committee  No. That would definitely be one of the bigger barriers, and they fear it very much, because they know there are lots of security rules and privacy rules, and that they are going to be liable if it's not done correctly. I would say it's a big area.