Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  I can. Certainly the numbers on profitability for 2021 and 2022, same quarter, year over year, are actually very comparable, at 3.4%. I think people need to understand that the pandemic did not necessarily bring strong profit growth. It brought strong sales growth, because obvio

Finance committee  Well, I mean, it's already being felt. California is obviously a massive source of fruits and vegetables, particularly as the seasons roll, but there have been droughts in western Canada as well and, of course, weather events of all kinds in British Columbia. It's not just the fr

Finance committee  Well, I'm not an expert on the carbon tax per se, but there's no question that every input tax increase is having an impact. That's true with taxation. Obviously it's true in regulatory compliance. Frankly, in the way that items are assessed for gender impact and for environmen

Finance committee  Monsieur Caron is actually a farmer, so perhaps I'd defer to his expertise, but obviously, anything that is reducing supply and driving up cost is of concern, and it is a cumulative thing. There are all kinds of virtuous things that government might be doing otherwise, but the cu

Finance committee  A lot of this is geopolitical, but there are some domestic solutions. Some of those are being focused on by the industry itself. I think some of those are more within the preserve of policy-makers like this committee. Consumers are changing habits, including where they are purch

Finance committee  Thank you. On behalf of the Retail Council of Canada and its members, I want to thank the committee for the opportunity to provide a grocery industry perspective to your study on inflation. I also want to express our hope that this study will properly examine the root causes of

Finance committee  Certainly we would have appreciated the help to arrive sooner rather than later. I don't think there's any question about that. It is a complex area, because it requires a reconfiguration of rates, and there are differences between Mastercard and Visa, I might add. It also requir

Finance committee  No, I do anticipate that the change will happen. We've had two, albeit relatively modest, rounds of reduction, one at the end of 2014, and one at the end of 2018. This is additional. I take note that the government, in its political capacity as the Liberal Party, had, in fact, p

Finance committee  Currently, the average is 1.4%, down from 1.5%. That is system-wide, but of course it doesn't speak to the individual card in the individual setting. Some of those cards, including the newly introduced Mastercard MUSE, can range up closer to 2.5%, but on a system-wide basis it is

Finance committee  I can't speak to Walmart's specific rates, but in the past that has been particularly true. In fact, there used to be tranches such that if you were of a certain size, you definitively got a lower rate. The networks—under some pressure from government, I might add—have actually n

Finance committee  The easiest one for me to point to is the European Union. In the European Union, there's a hard cap of 30 basis points on any credit card. Not only is that a fifth of the average rate in Canada or thereabouts, but that's a cap, so you would anticipate that it's lower than one-fif

Finance committee  Is this any better?

Finance committee  It's a gaming headset from my daughter, but hopefully it will pass muster. Good afternoon. I want to thank the committee for the invitation to appear today on behalf of the retail sector. For those of you who may not be familiar with RCC, we represent over 70% of core retail sa

Finance committee  I am not deeply familiar with HASCAP, in large measure because, as I've noted, most retailers would not qualify for it as they wouldn't meet the three months of sub-50% revenue within the prior eight months. Therefore, we have not delved into it as deeply as others have. Certain