Thank you so much.

Good afternoon, everyone.

My name is Daniel Kelly. I'm joined by my colleague, Michelle Auger, senior policy analyst.

Thank you for the opportunity to talk about lowering credit card fees for small and medium‑sized businesses.

CFIB has a long history on credit card processing fees in Canada. In fact, it goes back to 2007-08, when the credit card industry introduced premium credit cards like higher-end Visas and higher-end Mastercards. Merchants started to see fees increase rapidly, with no idea why.

We took this issue to Minister Flaherty at the time and worked with him very closely to develop a code of conduct for the credit and debit card industry. In fact, it was my organization, CFIB, that wrote the first draft of the code of conduct. We were very pleased when that was adopted with changes by the Government of Canada at the time.

That put some guardrails and better practices in place. This used to be the Wild West in the payments industry, and it did clean up a lot of the bad practices that had been used up until that point, but it didn't serve to lower rates.

We worked then with the Conservative government at the time on the first round of Visa and Mastercard fee reductions, and those went into effect. There was a second round when the Liberal government took office, so that's two previous rounds of credit card reductions for businesses and merchants.

However, I have to say that both of those rounds were imperfect, with much of the savings being captured by larger players in the industry, with some trickling down to SMEs.

The reason we were so pleased about this most recent round of reductions that was announced and went into effect just a couple of weeks ago is that it is very much focused on small and medium-sized companies specifically.

This reduction is welcome news. These are hundreds of millions of dollars in savings that we are hoping will hit the bottom lines of small and medium-sized companies across the country. For this to happen, we need it to be universal and respected by the industry as a whole.

I'll turn it over to Michelle for a few additional comments.