Environment committee  Depending on what they're interested in, what they were looking for, they would target importers or manufacturers.

Environment committee  Thank you for the question, Mr. Amos. There are two parts to it, but before that, I would say that the Canadian retailers have really started getting very competitive in the area of Black Friday sales, so do get out there and do some shopping.

Environment committee  To the first part of the question, yes, absolutely. Retailers are very committed to selling safe products, both for human health and for the environment, and for the obvious reasons you've mentioned, such as consumer confidence and that sort of thing. I think where the discussio

Environment committee  I'm not as familiar with that case. It's difficult for me to comment on that specific case, but I don't know that having strong legislative authorities would have been what would have made the difference in that particular instance, as opposed to voluntary information sharing bet

Environment committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, esteemed members of the committee. It's a great opportunity to be here to speak with you today and also to meet many of you. Before these hearings started, I think almost every member of the committee I met, almost without fail—I think there mi

International Trade committee  Can I comment quickly on that?

International Trade committee  That's a phenomenon known as country pricing, and it's a very real problem. That's why we support tariff elimination generally. It's a very competitive market. With retailers in Canada, it's the opposite of a monopoly. They are very competitive with one another, so the more we ca

International Trade committee  We don't anticipate that this agreement would have a big impact on cross-border shopping, given that there is already NAFTA as well as other agreements in place with the United States. Of course, the majority of cross-border shopping happens in the United States as opposed to oth

International Trade committee  Yes. There is a whole range of products that are up for almost immediate tariff elimination. As everyone around this table knows, the original reason for tariffs was to promote domestic manufacturing. There are a lot of examples where there isn't a lot of domestic manufacturing.

International Trade committee  That's the de minimis rate above which you have to pay duties and taxes as you would have to here in Canada. It has been $20 for quite some time. If anything, I'd like to see it actually lowered. Of course, that's administratively quite challenging. When that de minimis level was

International Trade committee  That's a really interesting question. We focus so much on the import end of things. The other witnesses here are talking more about export. We focus mostly on bringing more types of products, more consumer choice at better prices, more competitive prices for consumers. In terms o

International Trade committee  I don't think so. The position of the Retail Council is that we're very supportive of tariff elimination generally. The way that the agreement has been written, there are a few exceptions for which tariffs would be eliminated over time and there are some areas in which they wou

International Trade committee  It's an excellent question. Maybe I could touch on the notion of jobs first and then talk about cross-border shopping.

International Trade committee  We have not done that kind of analysis because our industry is very unique. There are a lot of other industries that are interested in regulatory coherence and harmonization that have one or two major issues; whereas, by definition, our members sell hundreds of thousands of produ

International Trade committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would like to thank the committee members for inviting me to testify today. First, I will tell you a little about the Retail Council of Canada, the RCC. The Retail Council of Canada has been the voice of retail in Canada since 1963. Retail employs ov