I know how to say that one correctly.
I can't disagree with my colleagues. I sat through the meetings at the finance committee here in the last session--or Parliament, I guess we call it--with the discussion of the asset-backed commercial paper. We had people here who--let me put it this way--were not really sophisticated investors and who relied completely on your rating.
It's not just us hearing it here. The National Post talks about you as the major international debt-rating agency that refused to give ratings to Canadian ABCP, commercial-backed paper, because they were not backed by levels of liquidity agreements and standards elsewhere, and so on and so forth. So it was not just us here. The financial world was on top of your rating of these things, and you've heard a lot, so I don't want to.... We would agree with some of the criticism that you've heard from across the way, and you came here today to sort of give us advice.
I talked to a witness at our Tuesday meeting about how I want to make sure that the public, and I, understand the difference. We had a problem with the commercial paper, called asset-backed commercial paper, but that pool you talked about had a lot of things in it that were questionable, in terms of.... Securitization is a need. That's what we were hearing about. My concern, and I want to make sure I'm accurate, is that the $12 billion facility that we're offering through this stimulus package is really for hard assets, assets people can understand—whether they're cars, trucks, or floor plans for dealerships.
A year ago, we were complaining about commercial paper and how it wasn't understandable, wasn't fully disclosed. It had a lot of things in there that I think Mr. Mulcair is absolutely...uncollectable if things went bad. Obviously, they did go bad. That is not what we're doing here, and I want you as a rating agency to tell me what the difference is, if you could.