They are masters at it. They have hundreds of tax lawyers working for them, looking for ways to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. I call them tax fugitives hiding out in tax havens. They certainly are not living up to their commitments to the good people of the riding that I represent. They abandoned my riding and I will never forgive them for it. Frankly, I will not bank in a major chartered bank in this country and I do not care who knows, although I guess everybody knows now.
There are many things that could have been done with this piece of legislation to try to impose some fairness into the financial institutions regime in this country. I remember when the former leader of the NDP, currently the member for Halifax, and I used to crash the shareholder meetings of the major banks. We had nine resolutions that we would put forward at every bank meeting. Two of them almost passed.
One of the resolutions that I moved at the Bank of Montreal failed to pass by less than 1%. In fact the result was 49.6 to 50.4. I remember because it was the same ratio as the Quebec referendum, 49.6 to 50.4. That resolution was gender parity on the board of directors. We came that close to dragging the banks into the 21st century kicking and screaming all the way, but the shareholders clearly wanted modernization of the banking system or they would not have supported gender parity on their own board of directors within one-half of one percentage point. We were very proud of that.
The other resolution that almost passed, and this one almost gave the CEO a heart attack, was that the salary of the CEO would be limited to 20 times that of the average employee. It would still be 20 times what an ordinary human being made, but CEOs were making 200 times and 300 times that of an average employee. That, sadly, did not succeed as a resolution.
It gives some indication of the amount of work that needs to be done if we are going to have a fair regime governing our financial institutions in this country, first to provide reasonable access to every person in this country. Whether people have any money or not, they deserve the right, and in fact they have the statutory right, to basic banking services. Even if people do not have any money but they want to open a bank account, they have to be allowed to open one. Do Canadians know that?
We would drive the payday lenders right out of business. People who have relationships with banks and need to borrow an extra $100 to get them through until their next paycheque could simply use their overdraft the way I or my colleagues do and pay a surcharge of a couple of dollars for that privilege instead of having to pay a surcharge beginning at 1,000% interest. Some of these institutions charge 10,000% interest on a simple loan. On title loans these companies are actually lending people $1,000 and making them sign over the title of their homes as collateral. If they fail to pay off the loan, they run the chance of forfeiting their homes.