Right, and the difficulty is that the banks are under no obligation to disclose any information about the profitability of that bank branch. So it really comes full circle, every time, on this issue--that is, legislative provisions that require transparency and accountability on the part of these financial institutions. That would make your agency a lot more effective, and it would give some assurances to consumers and to ordinary citizens that their interests are being protected. The right that Duff Conacher mentioned, which I totally support, the right to access financial services somewhere within one's community, must be upheld. This is not now the case.
So what we've got in Winnipeg North is that all the bank branches get closed, ATMs pop up, and then those ATMs of those banks are sold to private label companies. Then a person has to pay $6 to take out $20, or $30, or $40 of their own money. At private label, white label ATMs, it's as high as $6. And there are no regulations. At any rate, we're going to try to deal with that as well.
Let me ask a question about when it is possible for FCAC to actually prosecute. I understand there was a survey done in 2003, a mystery shopper survey of 1,600 bank branches, and you actually found that there were more than 800 bank branches in violation of the Bank Act. The reasons ranged from violating the legal requirement to post interest rate information, to violating the requirement to have a clear publicly available on holds on cheques, violating the requirement to have their public accountability statements publicly available, violating the requirement to make publicly available information on interest rates and loans, violating the prohibition on tied selling, and so on.
But as I understand it, no prosecutions ever happened. Then, I understand, in fact your agency then tried to reduce the areas for which you were surveying so that in fact you didn't get the same numbers again.
I think we need to have some clarification on that, to know what you're able to do when there are violations, in any one of these areas; whether or not you continue to survey on all those issues; and what we need to do, if you can't do it, to beef up the legislation to make it possible to go after banks that actually condone and allow these violations of very clear measures under the Bank Act.