I don't want to join in on the hallelujah chorus here, for goodness' sake. We are talking about banks and we are Canadians.
I don't know whether it's good luck, good management, or good intelligence, but I thought Ed Clark actually said one of the smartest things about the ABCP crisis. He said they tried to explain this product to him and he didn't understand it, so if he didn't understand it, he wasn't going to invest in it. I do wish that other bankers had actually followed that advice.
I want to actually direct my question to Mr. Nantais. I have a lot of sympathy for your situation, Mr. Nantais, and therefore a lot of sympathy for our own situation as a consequence. The growth in your market is elsewhere. It's not in North America. Your costs are here. Your costs are not terribly competitive. You have a huge capacity. You have to rationalize that capacity. And you're sitting on a whack of inventory and the inventory is not moving, notwithstanding all kinds of incentives on your part.
You come here quite legitimately, in my view, asking for somewhere in the order of $4 billion, $8 billion, or $10 billion worth of bailout, which will just cover off your burn rate for the next few months. You're asking for pension relief from the taxpayers, 70% of whom don't have pensions themselves. You say that the $12 billion the government is proposing is probably not adequate enough, and it should be up to $40 billion, because that market has dried up. I put it to you. That market dried up because the non-bank credit market has said effectively, “We're out of here. This is too much risk and we're not going to be in this any more.”
I appreciate I might have summarized that a little harshly. Nevertheless, is that somewhere close to the truth?