:
I call this meeting to order. This is meeting 21 of the Standing Committee on Finance.
Our orders of the day, pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), are for a study of emerging digital payment systems.
I want to welcome our guests here this afternoon. We're very pleased to have five presenters here this afternoon.
From the Canadian Bankers Association we have the vice-president, Mr. Darren Hannah. Welcome.
From the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada we have the commissioner, in her first appearance as commissioner before the committee, Ms. Lucie Tedesco. Welcome.
From the Retail Council of Canada we have Mr. David Wilkes, senior VP. Welcome to you as well.
From the Canadian Federation of Independent Business we have Ms. Corinne Pohlmann, the senior vice-president for national affairs.
From SecureKey Technologies Inc., we have the executive VP, Mr. Hugh Cumming. Thank you so much for being with us.
You each have five minutes for an opening statement, and then we'll have questions from members. We'll proceed in the order given, and we'll start with Mr. Hannah, please.
:
Mr. Chair, I'm very pleased to be here today representing the Canadian Bankers Association and our 60 members, which include domestic banks, foreign bank subsidiaries, and foreign bank branches operating in Canada. I welcome the opportunity to speak about emerging digital payments systems in Canada and to highlight the banking industry's work in this area and what we see as some of the key public policy considerations for decision-makers.
There is no question that the payments ecosystem is experiencing a surge of innovation in Canada and around the world. Innovation is especially evident in the area of retail payments, with the proliferation of web-based payment technologies and near-field communication, or NFC, applications.
In Canada banks are at the forefront of creating a modern and efficient payments experience for consumers and merchants. The principal innovation in retail payments since 2010 has been the wide rollout of NFC technology to facilitate contactless credit card and debit card transactions at the point of sale. The rollout has been among the most extensive in the world. Approximately 10% of all credit card transactions are now done through NFC.
With the recent data showing that more than half of Canadians own a smartphone, we see further opportunity for growth in mobile wallets and mobile payments, offering Canadians an additional choice that is efficient, secure, and convenient.
To facilitate the adoption of mobile payments in Canada for the benefit of consumers and businesses, Canadian banks and credit unions worked together to develop the Canadian NFC mobile payments reference model, which is a set of agreed-upon principles for mobile payments. Several mobile wallets have been launched by banks using this model.
Among other things, the model specifies the need for, first, data security, which is the essential foundation for any payments system and product, and second, consumer control over what type of payment they use and how they access it. The model is also built around the use of existing technologies, such as contactless payment terminals. This will provide merchants with a seamless opportunity to take advantage of these technologies using the systems that are already in place for debit and credit card acceptance.
The payments ecosystem involves the coordination of many parties to function effectively. It's our objective that providing early clarity on the design of systems that enable mobile payments will help build efficiencies into the future deployment of those systems in Canada.
Innovation in the payments system must be encouraged, but not without sufficient safeguards to ensure the safety of consumers and the stability of the current payments system. As this committee knows, rapid growth and innovation in digital payments has resulted in a much more fractured payments market, with new entrants and competitors offering novel payment solutions that are attractive to consumers. The emergence of this shadow payments system presents a variety of risks to Canadian consumers and to the security of the payments system, particularly in the context of consumer protection, consumer disclosure, data protection, and system stability.
This is especially evident in e-commerce and online payments, for which consumers can store their credit card and debit card credentials in digital wallets or load funds into online accounts for subsequent payments. Many of these solutions leverage existing payment clearing and settlement systems and credit card networks in the exchange of funds and payments data.
The banking industry has undertaken some analysis of these issues with a view to understanding their impacts and what is needed to address them, thereby encouraging debate and discussion.
As a result of this, we've come to a view that there is a strong case for implementing regulatory measures for shadow payments systems that would achieve three main objectives. One, it would ensure that consumers are properly informed about the payments services being offered. Two, payments service providers would be held to prudential and operational standards and thresholds to minimize the likelihood of a service provider causing harm to consumers and others in the payments system. Three, consumers would have access to some form of recourse should there be a failure to deliver the payments services as agreed.
The banking industry is proud to be an integral part of the evolution of Canada's strong payments system. Banks support an open, competitive, and innovative digital payments system that promotes consumer confidence and focuses on the safety and soundness of the broader payments system.
I look forward to your questions.
:
Good afternoon, and thank you for inviting the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada to participate in this interesting and important discussion.
Your interest in studying digital payments is most welcome and timely to those of us who work on financial consumer issues.
Before I describe our research into this emerging area, I would like to give you a brief overview of our agency. The federal government created the FCAC in 2001 to provide financial information to consumers and to oversee the market conduct of banks and other federally regulated financial institutions.
[Translation]
Since then, our mandate has expanded to include responsibility for advancing Canadians' financial literacy.
[English]
In addition, we were recently given the mandate of conducting research to monitor and evaluate emerging trends and issues that may impact consumers of financial products and services.
Last December we released a research report entitled, “Mobile Payments and Consumer Protection in Canada”. This report explores the emerging technology of mobile payments and assesses the extent to which financial consumers in Canada are protected in using them. For your perusal, you have been provided with the report's executive summary, which includes a link to the report in its entirety.
Mobile payment is made with a smartphone or another mobile device instead of a more traditional payment method, such as cash, credit, or debit. Many of the current and future offerings will allow consumers to use credit and debit cards as a source of funds for their mobile payments. This topic is of particular interest to us, considering that Canadian consumers and the Canadian market are recognized internationally as being well positioned for the successful adoption of mobile payments.
Our report concludes that while mobile payments offer great conveniences and benefits, they also pose potential risks to consumers.
[Translation]
Currently, consumer protection obligations vary based on the underlying source of funds, as well as the type of service provider offering the m-payment service, and that applies to disclosure, dispute resolution and redress mechanisms, and protection against fraud and misuse of assets.
[English]
There are also emerging consumer protection risks, including that malware and other malicious software may present risks of identity theft and fraud. In addition, mobile service providers may sell their user data to third parties, who may use this data to target advertise—this practice is known as profiling—based on behavioural and geographical information.
One of the associated risks here is that there is a potential to market harmful products to vulnerable consumers, including children. As a result, there is a need for educational materials to help consumers learn more about mobile payments, not only to inform their decision-making but also to provide them with measures that they can take to minimize their exposure to risk. FCAC is currently developing such materials, which should be available on its website later this spring.
Our research also identified some lessons learned from jurisdictions that have high rates of user adoption. For instance, the number of stakeholders involved in mobile payment transactions may increase the level of confusion and complexity related to dispute resolution and redress. This has been identified as yet another potential risk to consumers.
In response, jurisdictions such as South Korea have enacted legislation that attributes ultimate responsibility to the financial institution for handling dispute and redress, regardless of which service provider is responsible for the error. For its part, the OECD is promoting the creation of minimum protection standards to be applied uniformly across mobile payment systems.
[Translation]
It will be important to monitor the business practices of suppliers to understand whether, and to what degree, the uneven consumer protection framework is problematic for consumers.
[English]
FCAC will continue to monitor the evolution of these payments and will encourage Canadians to learn more about their rights and responsibilities when they are making mobile payments through the information that we will make available to them.
[Translation]
Thank you. I look forward to answering any questions you may have on the subject.
:
Good afternoon, and thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate the opportunity to present to you and your committee today.
As many of you will know, the RCC's, Retail Council of Canada's members are small and large businesses across the country and represent more than 45,000 storefronts of all retail formats, including general merchandise, grocery, specialty retail, independent stores, and online merchants.
The payments landscape has been a major area of focus for RCC for many years. In that regard we applaud the government's efforts to ensure that retailers and their customers have choice in the payment methods accepted in their stores, and we applaud the recent commitment to lower costs associated with payment acceptance that was announced in the recent budget.
With respect to mobile payments, I would like to outline some key areas of concern to the retail community, in particular, operation complexity, the cost of implementation, consumer and merchant choice, and expressed acceptance or consent.
First, let me deal with operational complexity. We are witnessing many trials and tests, but little is being done to ensure collaboration of all stakeholders in the payment supply chain and there is very little discussion about industry-wide standardization. In the short term we believe the technology is likely to diverge before it converges, and this lack of standardization could make the emergence of mobile payments messy for the consumer and inefficient for retailers.
To address this issue, RCC recommends that the government be tasked with ensuring that a standardized platform be defined for mobile applications in Canada.
Second, I will discuss cost. As retailers we have a responsibility to roll out and support technology that makes lives more convenient in a way that does not add additional unnecessary cost into the system. Containment of cost is vital for both consumer prices and retailers' bottom lines.
All payments must be treated the same regardless of the form in which they are made, whether it is by a plastic card or a mobile smartphone. Simply changing the form, in our opinion, cannot be a reason for increasing costs.
Let me give you a specific example. Let's take the card-present versus card-not-present situation. In a traditional payment, the consumer's credit card is either present at the point of sale, or it is not present, as in the case of online shopping in which you key in the number, or in telephone shopping or mail ordering. In the card-not-present case, retailers pay a higher cost to the credit card networks because of the potential for increased fraud and inconvenience for the processor.
Those situations don't exist in a mobile environment, and we really encourage the government to take a strong look. We recommend that mobile payments be treated as a card-present application rather than a card-not-present one. RCC asks the committee to recommend that mobile payments be treated in this way and that this be reflected in an updated payments code of conduct.
The final two areas I'll talk about are consumer and merchant choice.
Regarding consumer choice, it is our view that consumers should be given a range of payment options at the point of sale, regardless of whether they're using a physical or a mobile wallet. RCC strongly believes that networks, issuers, or processors should not set default settings for payments. The only party who should make that choice is the consumer. Again, we encourage the committee to recommend that these options must be set by consumers and that this be reflected in an updated code of conduct.
Not only is it vital that consumers be provided choice when considering mobile payment options, but so also should merchants be. Our final recommendation, Mr. Chair, is that retailers must have the ability to decide to accept mobile payments and that their acceptance not be implied or deemed simply because the retailer is accepting another form of payment, such as the tap and go form. The responsibility to decide whether to accept any form of payment, including mobile, must rest solely with the retailer, and this condition, requirement, or right must be reflected in updates to the payments code of conduct.
I too thank you for the opportunity to address the committee. I also look forward to your questions and the discussion on what is a vital topic for the retail industry.
:
As you may know, CFIB is a not-for-profit non-partisan organization representing more than 109,000 small and medium-size independent businesses across Canada. I will be walking you through a slide deck that I hope you have in front of you.
There's no doubt that payment systems, especially credit card-specific payments, have been a touchy subject for merchants of all sizes, but especially for smaller merchants, who often feel powerless against large payment networks because they feel they have little choice but to accept the terms of payment and technology imposed on them.
While they always have the option of not accepting credit cards, this is very difficult for some sectors, such as retail and hospitality, which could simply not operate without providing their customers with the option of paying by credit or debit, as you see on slide 2.
On slide 2 you can also see that cheques remain the top form of payments among all types of small and medium-size businesses. In fact, Canada has been slow in adopting e-invoicing and payment solutions, particularly at the business-to-business level.
The good news is that most entrepreneurs see the benefits of moving to electronic forms of invoicing, payment, and acceptance but have limited options that are user friendly and affordable. Our hope is that some of these emerging digital solutions will start to address this gap in the Canadian payments market.
As you'll see on slide 3, despite the abundance of businesses accepting credit cards, if given a choice of which payment type to accept, very few even among those in the retail and hospitality sectors would choose to accept credit cards, citing the cost as the biggest factor in that decision.
We welcomed the credit and debit card code of conduct in 2010, as it served to save low-cost in-store debit in Canada and provided merchants with a small degree of power in their dealings with the industry, but with all kinds of emerging digital technologies now entering the market, the code must be updated to address them.
Digital payments may offer some advantages to merchants and customers; they also hold the potential to create significant problems and drive up costs. There will soon be many more competitors in the market, including many non-traditional players, each with their own system and fee structure. The result may be additional confusion, complexity, and lack of clarity, especially for smaller merchants trying to balance consumer demand with their own cost to process those payments.
Unfortunately, the hasty and unfair introduction of premium credit cards in Canada served to reduce the trust Canadian merchants have in their payments industry. More recent merchant fee increases and plans to add another level of premium cards into the Canadian market have only added to the growing mistrust. As a result, small firms struggle to believe that the introduction of digital payments will not usher in significantly higher fees following an initial introductory period.
This skepticism is apparent in slide 5, where merchants are asked to rate the current fees associated with each type of credit card. Most feel that Interac debit fees are fair or good, and a majority also find that fees associated with regular credit cards are at least fair, underlining that many merchants accept that there should be a cost associated with the service.
It is in regard to premium credit cards that most are stating that fees are poor, because from a merchant's perspective, there is little additional value for the extra fees they are paying to accept them.
Even more concerning is a lack of transparency. As you can see on slide 6, almost three-quarters of respondents said that it was somewhat or very difficult to understand their credit card fees. Our concern is that this will only become more complex when adding digital payments.
While we understand that currently there is no difference between the fees associated with digital payments and current credit card rates, we find it hard to believe that this scenario will be maintained in the long run, for the simple reason that additional players, such as telecommunication companies, are now involved. As you can imagine, the level of trust that small businesses have for major telecom companies is not much better than it is for credit card companies. Bringing these two industries together does not give small business much comfort that their costs will not increase in the future.
One solution is to quickly update the credit card code of conduct to include new provisions that allow some power to merchants when it comes to emerging digital technologies. We were pleased to hear reference in both the throne speech and the recent budget to making further changes to the code to improve fairness and transparency and help lower credit card acceptance costs for merchants.
These code improvements must include provisions that require payment networks to obtain express written consent for each digital product they put out, even if it is at the same fee as other forms of payment. We understand that industry players will not want to go back to merchants each time a new technology, a new payment option, or a new feature of a wallet is introduced. However, merchants have very few powers other than the ability to choose the payment options they offer. That is why express written consent is absolutely vital to ensure that there is a degree of fairness in the system.
CFIB believes that there are only two parties in making a transaction: the merchant and the consumer. Only merchants should be able to decide which forms of payment they wish to offer, and only consumers should be able to decide by which method they will pay. All payment methods, apps, and technologies should be set to respect the wishes of these two parties, and default settings should not be allowed.
With the proliferation of new players who will enter the payments market, including telecommunications and technology companies, ensuring that the code effectively covers all these players is essential.
A formal and accessible dispute resolution process must be implemented. The current mandate of the FCAC allows it to review complaints for information only and does not provide advice or relief to small business owners. A proper dispute mechanism should have the power to require resolution to specific problems.
Finally, as I mentioned, there is a gap in the Canadian payments market around B to B, business-to-business, transactions and somewhat around business-to-government and government-to-business transactions for smaller businesses. We would encourage emerging digital payment technologies to start filling that gap with potential solutions that are affordable, accessible, transparent, user friendly, and secure, and that allow tracking for record keeping.
Thank you.
:
Thank you very much, everyone.
I'll speak briefly about SecureKey. We provide authentication and identity solutions in working with banks and governments. I have a brief PowerPoint presentation to give us some perspective on the future of digital commerce.
First of all, I'd like to start with the challenge. Consumers must identify themselves today on every channel in order to achieve continuity in the experience online. Whether mobile or web, the identity challenge is even greater. Merchants must ask users to create a new user name, password, or other token to make repeat visits easier to grow their relationships. This creates separate log-in passwords for each retailer and creates frustration and abandonment risk.
Unlike in the physical world where one credential or a credit or debit card works at multiple retailers, each online site has a dedicated approach. If online and in-store experiences are to converge, users must be able to replicate the one credential to many retailer relations. In short, consumers need to be able to bring their own credentials. We call this BYOC. Our challenge is to ultimately enable consumers to visit their favourite retailers using credentials that they remember and trust.
Online approaches today are being done in silos and are handled by each organization differently across channels, creating different experiences and outcomes, forcing users to create new passwords at each site and to download new mobile apps. Passwords get reused from site to site, so when Joe's Flowers gets hacked, we hear in the news that it was Facebook, but in reality it was the weaker site that allowed the password to be compromised.
The PCI has set standards on payment-card data, but has not created interoperability in allowing merchants to exchange data. The experience and degree of data protection varies with each implementation and is a card-centric experience rather than a user-centric experience. These silos result in gaps that have exposed consumers to social engineering and other threats, resulting in fraud and other losses.
Cross-channel credentials require a crisp identity. Consumers expect consistent experiences. A converged approach to digital identity where consumers can use their credentials across channels and organizational boundaries eliminates friction and fraud. What if I could use my TD credential at Canadian Tire or my Shoppers Drug Mart log-in at Costco? What if I could do this without losing the ability to share attributes in my control and without limiting my ability to have a relationship with those organizations that I choose?
An example of this in action is the work that SecureKey is doing in Canada. Consumers are using their existing bank and telco credentials to access over a hundred government applications. It is a user-centric experience that enforces strong authentication while enforcing blinding properties to prevent leakage of privacy information. In Canada alone over a million people use this system today. It's a great proof-point that this idea of bringing your own credential is appealing to consumers.
Let's talk about how this transition to a user-centric approach can be applied to payments. The old-world approach was effectively a walled garden. The credit card was dominant. The data ran over the credit card's network. Every participant—the bank, the merchant, the acquirer—participated according to rules governed and controlled by the credit card industry. Now we're moving away from homogenous dedicated networks toward a great diversity of networks and ecosystem participants.
Payments now travel through many parties on shared networks. Digital and mobile wallets are proliferating. Bell, Rogers, Telus, RBC, TD, and CIBC have recently announced mobile payment strategies. Each is using different approaches, different technologies, and different approaches to security and risk. In addition, the online world has brought together new competitors that have capitalized on the disruption. Over 120 million people today use PayPal for online checkout. Amazon is the world's largest e-tailer, with over 100 million users.
A lack of standards has resulted in many high-profile breaches, most notably in the U.S. due to scale, exposing tens of millions of credit cardholders to fraudsters. The market needs a better standard for consumer data security. In shifting away from individual merchant-owned repositories and providing an on-demand framework for merchants to access consumer data from trusted sources—banks, issuers, digital wallets, or identity attributes—an open-identity ecosystem is the foundation.
Governments can help by paving the way to clarify rules of engagement surrounding an online equivalent to the know your customer practices used by banks, creating the open-identity and payment ecosystem where users are centric to the model, enabling how they authenticate, what happens to attributes, which devices they use, and creating auditability and traceability.
Just as the Internet was disruptive to payment brands, the smartphone is disruptive to the payment process. The smartphone enables a new model that is user-centric.
This model enables extensible trust networks that let users mix and match between authentication credentials and payment brands. Strong and open authentication standards take advantage of mobile devices and secure hardware and dedicated channels for the consumer. Privacy is a core component. The user has control over when and what data is shared.
In short, what this amounts to for consumers is agency. Instead of being a passive consumer of the technology, they are an active participant in the next payment network.
Finally, here are some of the things that we believe are required for a success in evolving payments technologies: user choice and convenience supporting multiple channels and converged approaches; thinking about online, in-store, and person-to-person payments as a single way of communicating; being conscious about the trend of bring your own device involving the consumer at the root of consumer identity; open standards; security; privacy; industry mandate for broad acceptance; and a supportive framework for regulation.
Thank you.
Ms. Pohlmann of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, I have a question in a similar vein.
David Robinson of Rogers appeared before this committee on Tuesday. When asked how they plan on generating revenue with their mobile payments technology, this is what he said, “We do charge the issuer for the service of secure distribution, storage, and support of their payment cards on our infrastructure.” When asked how those fees were visible with the transaction, he said, “I have no visibility whatsoever to the transactional fees that are charged between the merchant acquirer and the merchant, none whatsoever.”
So, briefly, we were told there were no fees, then that there were some fees, and then that they're hidden from anybody. Is this the kind of hidden fees that get added through the payment chain that small businesses are already burdened with? Are they afraid that even more of this will happen in the future with this mobile technology?
:
Thank you to our witnesses for being here today. We've had another number of interesting presentations.
Mr. Wilkes, I'd like to start with you. I want to talk about the cost of complexity, a piece that you mentioned, and then there were the barriers to entry, the standard platform, and those types of things.
In our first meeting, we were discussing the barriers to entry. Because of the security that's required and other types of things, not just anybody is going to be able to enter this market, because there's a certain barrier to entry just on that. What I'd like to ask is, when you talk about the standard platform, how would you see that happening? I can see there would be a certain number of players in. I can't imagine that we're going to have a big, diverse group in, because of those barriers to entry, so how would you see that standardization happening?
:
I think indeed a role the government has is to ensure that. Let me give you an example. With iPhones, you can make web-based transactions on them right now, but you can't make mobile transactions on them. You have probably the biggest player in the smartphone arena and you don't have the ability to make a mobile transaction. What we're very concerned about is that we're going to have, as I mentioned in my opening remarks, various proprietary solutions. What that's going to do is add complexity.
My colleague here indicated that you may have a variety of different payment passwords, and so on and so forth. What we are very concerned about is that as you get additional platforms involved, as you get an Android platform, as you get a BlackBerry platform, as you get an iPhone platform, you're going to have a variety of ways in which these payments occur. You're going to have confusion within the marketplace, and you're going to have inefficiencies that, from a retailer or merchant perspective, only add cost.
We believe, as we have seen in other payment technologies, for example, with the chip and PIN, where MasterCard and Visa have come together with a similar or same platform on that, this should be a mandate that is asked for by the government in order to ensure standardization and efficiency in the mobile arena.
:
That's an excellent question. Not only is the business-to-business part slow in developing, but so are the business-to-government and government-to-business parts. Perhaps government can play a role in building a system within payments to government that can help spearhead or drive a bit of this innovation, right?
That doesn't say it doesn't exist right now. It does. It's just that right now it's inaccessible to smaller firms, so how do we make sure that those types of business-to-business transactions can be made more accessible to small firms?
Again, I'm hesitant to suggest that government does anything that is directly intervening, but I do think that part of the solution might be to see if government can look at their own ways they interact with business, because through taxation, businesses have to pay government by cheque all the time. Perhaps there are methods or means there that can be used to drive innovation in the private sector as well.
I don't know, but these are things I'm throwing out there. It's definitely a growing issue. There's a real demand among small businesses and a frustration that when they try to use the systems that are already out there, those systems are really not accessible to them because of cost or infrastructure requirements.
Who are some of the major players in this now who might create opportunities?
:
Thank you all for being here and participating in what could be described as a fascinating subject, especially for those of us who are having trouble still figuring out BlackBerrys. We see the new technology that's been displayed here. It's quite remarkable.
Ms. Tedesco, you touched with Mr. Adler on the subject of whether or not people spend more money. I would suspect it is quite a bit more.
Ms. Pohlmann, I think we've had this discussion as well before, and I think we're still members of your organization at home. There's the ability to pay now for what normally in the past.... If you had cash in your pocket you'd look and you'd say, “We can't go out for dinner. I have $20 left and that has to last me for the rest of the week.” Hasn't this changed the whole culture that we live in?
I guess that's two things. I sympathize with your members because I'm one of those members. By the same token, I recognize that so many of those things they rail against, so many of those things we railed against really have made business that much easier.
As the first thing, I'll ask you to comment on that a bit.
Could you suggest whether or not some of the huge debt being incurred by the Canadian family is possibly a result of an immature populace that's moving into this new electronic age?
Ms. Pohlmann first.
I have given notice of this motion. The motion is:
That the Committee invite the Minister of National Revenue and the appropriate officials to appear before the Committee regarding the Supplementary Estimates (C) 2013-2014 on or before March 6, 2014 and that this meeting be televised.
Specifically, Chair, I'd like to discuss the section of the estimates that refers to voted appropriations, “Funding for the implementation and administration of various tax measures announced in the 2012 Federal Budget including Enhancing Transparency and Accountability for Charities...”. This is a horizontal item, which is an allocation of $6.3 million.
As I understand it, the supplementary (C)s refer to money for the investigation of charities, which of course has been the subject of enormous concern in the media and in the public. I believe that it is entirely legitimate to invite the minister to come and address the expenditures in that regard. I understand there may be some procedural concerns with the motion. If that is the case, I'm more than happy to amend the motion to alleviate those procedural concerns, to broaden it, for example, to just ask for a briefing by the minister, or whatever, under Standing Order 108(2).
In any event, without doubt, I think there are serious concerns and questions that arise from recent revelations that a number of the most prominent and respected environmental groups in the country are now being aggressively audited by the Canada Revenue Agency. This was first announced in a budget measure in 2012, when Minister of Natural Resources touted the $8-million plan to audit charities as cracking down on “environmental and other radical groups” that he claimed were undermining Canada's interests.
On the serious questions about this budgetary expense and about the appropriate use by the CRA of audits, I think Canadians deserve answers, which is why I'm moving this motion today. It's my hope that colleagues will agree with me and vote in favour of that motion.
:
In response, I think you did say that the motion was in order. Under the Standing Orders of the House of Commons, this committee does have jurisdiction over both the Minister of Finance and the Minister of National Revenue. That's clear in the standing orders.
As I said, if there are concerns about the specificity of the motion, I'm more than happy, of course, to expand it to simply ask the minister to appear and explain these issues of public concern. Canadians have an interest in the accountability of the minister for the actions of the agency.
I'm particularly concerned, as I said in the motion, about the expenditure of money to go after these charities. There are so many other topics I would like to invite the minister to come to talk about, such as tax havens and corruption in the Montreal CRA office. I'm happy to broaden the motion, but it occurred to me that because there is a specific item in the estimates, the appropriation of this money, this $6.3 million for this very purpose, I thought it would be more helpful to be specific than to be general.
Under Standing Order 108(2) this standing committee can request a report on any matter, and I would request that the minister assist us on that study. I'd like to study this issue in detail. If it's not technically appropriate for reasons of precedent to do this as a matter of the supplementary estimates (C), it is still appropriate for us to do it. This is the committee where the minister is to be held to account for actions and expenditures within that agency, so it seemed to me this was the appropriate place to bring forward those concerns.