This is an amendment to actually give some clout to the role of the commissioner under the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada, when dealing with the possibility of bank closures. As members will know, it's been very hard for communities to get all the information for clients of banks to know exactly what's happening. Part of the reason for that is that the banks are not compelled to give information about the reasons for the closure in terms of profitability, to give actual bank statements or statements of how well the bank is doing financially. It just makes some basic requirements calling for a cost-benefit analysis, for descriptions of alternative services that might be available, and for a full outline of what the bank does in terms of its corporate responsibilities, so that communities will know what happens, what will happen when that bank closes its doors. Then they can make a full case and try to persuade the bank to either stay or to think about what alternatives they have to put in place.
It's very important in areas where whole communities have been abandoned by the banks. I'm not just talking about Winnipeg North. There are rural communities that have been left high and dry and the credit union movement has moved in. There are cases where many people, as I've said earlier, have to turn to payday lenders or to ATMs, and they pay a price for that kind of service and the fact that the banks have abandoned their communities. We're not talking about communities where they can just run off to these big box banks in the suburbs. We're talking about communities where there are individuals who haven't the luxury to be able to do that. They might not have computers in their homes to be able to access automated services. They might not be able to actually obtain the services without some sort of service in their community.
Basically the point here is that, as others said yesterday, including Duff Conacher, the issue of access to banking services is a right. There needs to be a recognition, somewhere in this bill, that community banking services are there and entrenched in our sytem.