I heard three questions in there, and I'll try to answer them quickly.
In terms of the financial market or financial system, the distinction is that a financial system would include financial markets but would also include, importantly, the clearance and payments system and financial institutions, market participants, the system as a whole.
I'm going to defer on the Canadian modifier for a moment. I'm actually not familiar enough with that aspect of the drafting, but the important question you are asking is why we are asking for this and what is a change. I would say a couple of things.
This is practical. What we think we're asking for is a practical change. When the Bank of Canada Act was originally drafted, there was a prescribed list of securities against which we could undertake these open market operations, to use the generic term. The relevance of a number of those securities to the financial markets has decreased over time because of financial innovation, and so, for example, we cannot buy, for the purposes of resale, money market securities longer than 180 days. We cannot buy corporate bonds. There is a host. We cannot buy term asset-backed securities. We cannot buy municipal bonds, or we cannot buy corporate commercial paper. These are big chunks of the financial market, and the issues we are facing right now are issues of provision of liquidity to core bits of the market.
What we're looking for—we have tremendous flexibility in the overnight market in terms of what we can do, and under the current paragraph 18(g.1) we have tremendous flexibility, unlimited flexibility, if we declare “severe and unusual stress” as exists in the existing legislation. What we don't have is the full modern, if you will, flexibility in the intermediate period, which is the situation we're in right now in terms of purchase and resale agreements. We can do it on securities lending, but there are different types. It gets very technical very quickly, and I only have seven minutes.
What we are asking for is one of the first steps that our international peers did following the start of this crisis. They were able to expand the list of securities they went against.
The last point, for absolute clarity, is that we have not pumped $10 billion into the market. It's very important to be clear that we are running term purchase and resale facilities. They mature, and when they mature we have to take a decision about whether to roll them, so on the $4 billion in $2 billion tranches, you see an announcement that says, okay, we're doing another $2 billion. It is rolling the maturing amount that was out there for 28 days, and that's because the situation still remains somewhat strained.
I'll give you time.