Finance committee  Pardon me?

Finance committee  It's of that order. It's a little deceptive because, of course, when you look at retail numbers, which are a little over $500 billion in Canada, about $100 billion of that is auto, about $50 billion is gas, and it's hard not to do that in-store. With groceries, it is a similar si

Finance committee  I don't, and I'll tell you why. The advocates will tell you that we're at Ugandan levels. Actually, we're the same level as the EU, which is 22 euros, or the U.K., which is 16 pounds. Just to be clear, in value-added tax jurisdictions, this is actually quite a standard level. Se

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. On behalf of the Retail Council of Canada's 45,000 storefronts, I'd like to bring a retail perspective to your pre-budget deliberations. In the Tour de France, the last place cyclist is traditionally referred to as the lanterne rouge, and in recent yea

Finance committee  No, we don't have a developed one. We do a fair bit of work in the area of environmental responsibility. It's some distance from us, although obviously, it affects us. We tended to look to views from large final emitters and from environmental specialists. We don't have much to s

Finance committee  We are strong believers that this industry needs to be regulated, and part of that is that the ultimate beneficiaries of interchange are the banks and to some limited degree, cardholders, although the banks are the primary beneficiaries. But they don't negotiate on their own beha

Finance committee  Some of our members would probably carry sharpened stakes and garlic, and so on. It's a hard file to kill. The issue, for us at least, is not online shopping. We're prepared to compete, and indeed our top 10 members' online sales match Amazon and eBay sales, eBay also being a mem

Finance committee  Yes, that's provincial and federal tax revenue, of course.

Finance committee  The reasons for price differentials between Canada and the U.S. are many. Some of them are fairly straightforward economies of scale and population that you would expect to see. Some of them are a rather poor practice called country pricing, in which Canadians are charged either

Finance committee  There were really only two countries that have rates that are comparable to Canada, and the U.S. has a comparable rate. I guess you could view it that the parent companies of both MasterCard and Visa are located there and it is tough negotiating packages. There have been some r

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair and members, for allowing me to contribute to your pre-budget deliberations and to speak to some of the issues that matter to our industry. For members who haven't heard from us before, RCC is a not-for-profit industry association. Founded in 1963, we repres

Industry committee  For somebody stepping away from their desk to get a coffee, while some party is in the same room who may or may not have actually passed by that desk but with no certainty that the individual has done so, I think you have to have a materiality threshold.

Industry committee  Sure, it is a good practice.

Industry committee  I think we would differ. I think that there probably is a threshold level below which—whether it's the period for which a filing drawer was open or a screen was left unattended—it actually might fall below a material level for the necessity of maintaining records, and in partic

Industry committee  No. Let's make a distinction here between recording and reporting. We have a concern about the recording burden. The section on recording is very strictly worded, which essentially means every breach of security safeguards. We can envisage a world in which that creates the burd