First of all, Mr. Chairman, thank you very much for the opportunity. I'm happy to join the committee in their deliberations whenever I can report in or be of assistance.
Let me make several points. You will note that the Senate banking committee has just set out a report. I refer to it in terms of its comments on our awareness and the wide range of materials that are available to you, to your constituency offices and to your constituents, to Canadian consumers. We're driving a very aggressive awareness program around choices, around products such as credit cards. We have materials out on payday loans. I have a working partnership with Veterans Affairs to allow for individuals who will get, through their disabilities, lump sum payments, and how to manage that, how to handle that, going forward. It's just a basic one-pager to get them started. So we're making progress in getting to those consumers.
We have done a major examination of mortgages of the major institutions where we've got them to improve their penalty clauses, to change them to have a far better and clearer acceptance of a plain language approach. This has affected millions of consumers across the country. This is particularly key around their penalty clauses and what was a lack of clarity. This means that about 70% of the market, because of the federal dominance of these institutions, is pretty well covered. To go further on that, it would probably take some joint effort between provincial and federal regulators. I'll be continuing to discuss those with what's called a joint forum, which is the provincial regulators, so we can collaborate on it.
Finally, I'll share with you my briefing materials to the Minister of Finance--the question came up--for everybody to have a look at. In there I refer to the fact that when I find them off base on penalty clauses or on a number of items, our compliance officers and individual consumers over the call centres have pointed out areas where there can be miscalculations on the charges laid against people. When that has been across wide bands of individuals, and it could lead to a compliance issue where I may hold them in violation, they have volunteered to pay out and rebate consumers across the country. We are now, as of today, at $80 million back to individual consumers. In the next 48 hours there will be another institution that will be, again, making restitution, volunteering, that will increase that to about $87 million-plus.
I think it's to the credit of this committee and Parliament that, as cumbersome and as difficult as it is to get the progress, I believe the progress is there in pursuing these two mandates. But we need to collaborate and keep working together on a number of the issues that individual members have raised.
I know that a number of you have been through the wringer many times, and we've seen each other in previous movies, but many of you are new to the committee or to the House. We provide a full brief, and we'd be happy to take you down to the offices, go through it, or come up to your offices. I'm pleased to be meeting with the parliamentary secretary tomorrow morning, I believe, and the minister shortly. I invite any of you or any of your colleagues in your caucuses to join with me or my colleagues to go through exactly what we're doing and what we don't do, and suggestions on what we could be doing.
Thank you very much.