I think first we need to understand what the situation is today in the Canadian market. In the Canadian market, most of the time you see that small and medium-sized businesses are not using online tools as much as they should in order to grow. That is a statement of fact. If you go look at eBay or others, from their statistical point of view, they will say they're not using it.

Why are they not using it? The underlying economics are not supportive of it. To give you an example, if I'm south of the border and I order some goods from any store, the goods will show up the next day at the price I clicked on my screen. At that price, at my door, they will appear. If I do that sitting in my home today, they will be double the cost with shipping and everything else.

The economics do not support it. Fundamentally, the business model for online trade in Canada is not exactly where it needs to be. That needs a little bit of work.

The second part is privacy and security. That needs a much deeper discussion in terms of what gets disclosed. This is really a policy instrument that government, with industry, needs to develop in terms of what is getting disclosed from consumers and users on the platform. When we talk about data on a platform, it's not necessarily residing here. The moment your computer is connected to a wire, it is reachable from anywhere in the world. We live in a day of false security that everything is resident here. It isn't.

I think the policy instruments need a lot more work. I don't think any study has been done, or government has any work getting done, on what type of data people should put up in online trade. There is a lot of trepidation on the part of users to use the e-commerce platform. Economics aside, they don't want to put data up online. That's holding a lot of the consumption back. People do shopping online but they don't buy because they have to put in some data and information.

This is where some of the policy discussions become very important—what we expect our citizens to put in, how we manage it, and where it resides. On that part, I don't think we have a good answer yet.

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