Industry committee  We believe that we need to look at things like surcharging. I agree, most of our members are not going to want to surcharge, and I understand that. The point behind the idea of allowing the surcharging is that it gives power back into their hands. We know in other international e

Industry committee  It includes the banks, the credit card companies. I believe the Consumers' Association of Canada, and the Retail Council of Canada are part of it as well. I don't think it's all the banks. I don't sit on it, but our president, Dan Kelly, does. I believe that's the mix. It's a mi

Industry committee  It probably started about the beginning of this year or late last year. They are meeting every two to three months. They have a meeting this week.

Industry committee  It's not an easy balance. The credit card industry in Canada is dominated by two or three, and maybe now four, players, given the entry of Discover into Canada. Given that they have such a dominance in that particular market, we believe there needs to be a little bit of oversigh

Industry committee  The data you just quoted came from one of our surveys, where we do know that 80% of our members are still using cheques for business-to-business transactions. That's really where the biggest hurdle is: it's these business-to-business types of payments. For business-to-consumer tr

Industry committee  We always knew when the code of conduct was introduced in 2010 that it would be a document that needed to be updated constantly. We do think it's in need of updating today, including adding some provisions around mobile payments, on which there have been some good consultations d

Industry committee  To have a balanced budget?

Industry committee  That is very important to our members. It's among one of the top two or three most important issues for our members, that governments at all levels look to find ways to bring budgets back into balance as soon as possible.

Industry committee  Yes. If you look at slide 10 of the deck I gave you, where we look at the obstacles to accepting electronic payments, the fourth one, at 26%, says “concerned with online security”. We delved into this further. It's related to the fear that they become liable, of course, should

Industry committee  It really depends, obviously, on the rates they are able to negotiate, but in addition to that, of course, is the cost of setting up the systems. No, I don't have any exact numbers of what that could look like, but certainly we know when premium cards were introduced into the mar

Industry committee  As I said earlier, I think there are different ways. We can perhaps encourage new technologies to move into those areas—I'm not an expert in this area either—such as satellite technologies and wireless technologies that could perhaps bring some competitive options into those more

Industry committee  The cost of accepting credit cards has been going up, and just went up again on April 1. These are definitely barriers for small firms to adopt. The advent of mobile payments in the Canadian marketplaces worries a lot of small business owners because the last time we saw a new

Industry committee  It's harder and harder to differentiate. You're absolutely right, as the vast majority of our members want to serve their local markets and that's where they're happy. It may be a service business too, so it's really just about interaction with people. They really just want to be

Industry committee  On the wireless side, we didn't include questions on the wireless Internet in the survey that we did. We did ask about wireless telephones, but we didn't have time to include those results in the survey or this particular presentation. The satisfaction with access to wireless pho

Industry committee  It's difficult to ask a smaller company that's providing Internet service to create and build whole new lines. We're a big country in lots of different ways and so we need to make sure that they have access to the lines that already exist, many of which were built through governm