I also want to publicly thank Mr. Cunningham for his group's assistance in passing my private member's bill on fire-safe cigarettes. It's an important and groundbreaking piece of legislation, and I understand it's pretty well gone around the world. So I think you need to be able to pat yourself on the back on that.
But I'm going to ignore your issue too, because we have a very limited amount of time and we have a bill that has a lot of extremely important issues to it.
I want to start with you, Mr. Poschmann, on this increase in powers. On a theoretical basis, we sort of agree that the legislative authorities of the Bank of Canada need to be updated. But there is a perverse consequence to this. It appears, in effect, to reward bad behaviour.
If bank X is in difficulty because it bought a whole pile of junk, and bank Y didn't buy junk on the marketplace, now bank X can go to the Bank of Canada and say, “Mr. Governor, I have this pile of paper here and I really need some money for it. Would you mind giving me some money?”
Under these authorities, particularly if there's any hint that maybe the bank has any difficulties with liquidity, the governor will be under an enormous amount of pressure to respond to that request on the part of the bank that behaved poorly in the marketplace.
I'd be interested in your comments on that.