Finance committee  I suggested a couple of places where I thought there was enough jurisdiction to sneak this material in, to be honest, and the one on information seemed to be the best place to put it. In terms of what substantive rights we would like, the American law that we're referring to, the

Finance committee  If it's a cheque clearance item, I have to agree with Mr. Conacher that it's done overnight in most cases, so 24 hours would be appear to be reasonable. For other postings, I know that when you pay—this came up in the committee—a credit card bill from an account it seems to take

Finance committee  Little. Certainly the limits and timeframes they would pick would be ones that would be the least they could get away with, or the.... What I'm trying to say is that they would stretch it out as long as they could. There's interest involved, so that's obvious. We've found that w

Finance committee  I'm just going to repeat Duff's comments, that something needs to be done to help organize civil society, if I can put it that way, and consumer groups to bring that position forward. It is a resource problem, a chronic problem. Always, always, as well, we all gird our loins for

Finance committee  Well, I guess we're taking a little opportunism here to say put it in the Bank Act, because now is the chance to put it in the Bank Act, but the banks touch so much of the electronic payments that we thought it would be an appropriate place to start. Ideally, it would apply to

Finance committee  Yes, I see. All the banking processes are now electronic. There are other issues, such as when there are debit problems. This comes from the banking institution and not from the provincial jurisdiction.

Finance committee  According to studies of other ombudsmen in the areas of privacy and telecommunications, an ombudsman with adequate powers... There is a problem right now with firms that are the subject of ombudsman decisions but that have never made any changes to their processes. So the same pr

Finance committee  An ombudsman sometimes makes recommendations to Parliament, known as translaws. That is done in Australia for Telecom. In my opinion, that could be useful here.

Finance committee  All the payments involve the banking system.

Finance committee  That is one of the things we're driving at. Actually a separate piece of U.S. legislation did address that very problem some years ago in the United States. I can get you the name of it; I just forget it offhand. It reduced the time, because it recognized that the payment system,

Finance committee  Absolutely.

Finance committee  I agree that this raises a jurisdictional problem. We hope to have good arguments. Take the example of our approach to electronic commerce. This involves federal jurisdiction over commerce. Yes, I know it is difficult. The provinces have already been moving ahead on this. Howeve

Finance committee  The actual Public Interest Advocacy Centre acts as a law firm for often other consumer groups, such as the Consumers' Association of Canada and the National Anti-Poverty Organization. The other members of the coalition are member-supported. So the other five members are member-su

Finance committee  It's a coalition of all of these other groups, which we've joined together in the last three years, yes.

Finance committee  Thank you. The Canadian Consumer Initiative is a coalition of six major consumer organizations, including the Alberta Council on Aging, Automobile Protection Association, Consumers Council of Canada, Option consommateurs, Public Interest Advocacy Centre, which I represent, and t