A Senator from New Brunswick is blasting Visa and Mastercard for abusing consumers and merchants for a decade.
Pierrette Ringuette says the high merchant fees are gouging, and her legislation this Fall will put a stop to it.
She says Canada has some of the highest fees in the world, costing consumers and companies more than $5 billion annually.
She says this is the fifth time she’s had to put her bill forward, in part because of the extreme lobbying by credit card companies.
“Huge lobbyists, I remember the first time my bill went to the Banking Committee, you could almost hear in the background of the Committtee in all those chairs, there was about 60 lobbyists,” says Ringuette.
She says it’s not a fifth evolution of the bill, but the same bill for a fifth time because “remember we had prorogation, prorogation, and then last May, the Tory Senators in the Banking Committee killed my bill just like that.”
Ringuette says other developed countries have legislated caps on fees.
“Two years ago the European Union put a cap on these merchant fees at 0.3%, not 3%, but 0.3%,” says Ringuette.
She adds similar caps could save Canadian merchants and consumers billions of dollars.
