Inquiries, but geez, an awful lot of consumers out there contact my offices and contact, I'm sure, every MP's office about interest rates, about service charges, about this, that, and so on. So I'm just wondering....
You say here, “Violations found: 120”, and “Administrative Monetary Penalties total: $117,000”. You also mention public warnings and so on and so forth. As I understand it, Bill, you're saying that your job...and I think it's a very important job, but we're trying to get to where the consumers actually want some sort of....
You can't do redress. When a complaint comes in from a consumer and they call your office and say, “Listen, I think somebody at this bank”--or this credit union or this insurance company--“has done something wrong on a calculation”, and you open up a file and find the evidence that points to that, you can't do the redress. Do you then send that out to the ombudsperson? You say that you work together closely.
First of all, I would think that there are probably hundreds of thousands of complaints. Who's getting all those complaints? I'm trying to find the division between what your organization does and what the ombudsperson does and to get to the very issues that I think Garth and others would talk about, the ones that are really....
If the problem is not so much regulatory, or the non-compliance by financial institutions, but that parliamentarians have to really get down to whether or not it's payday stuff or whether or not it's interest rates and services charges and banks and so on, which may be more legislative, then we ought to know that, and not give people a false sense of hope if they complain to you that you're going to remedy the interest rate charges. I think we assume that everybody out there knows what's going on in the marketplace, and I'm not sure they do.
I'm just trying to connect the dots here as to how we get to Garth's sort of problem and your job, and how it is that's legislative regulatory, and perhaps the other levels of ombudspersons who actually get to talk to the consumer and do the redress stuff.