Sure. As I mentioned, the first is a price review.
In the past decade when Canadians have been asked about access to credit and these banking services, 90% have said these are essential to function in society. Whether you're trying to travel or rent a car, you just need to have access to basic credit. We view it as something that should be treated as other essential services are treated, like energy utilities. When you have the concentration of market share within a few companies, there is even more reason to do so.
So in order to establish where the fair baseline is in terms of fair prices, you need to go through an audit. Send in the auditors to these companies. Don't trust their own figures, because they can fudge them given the looseness of general accounting rules and how often their credit card divisions are mixed in with all their operations. Do these independent audits.
Nothing would be disclosed that would be proprietary. It would just simply let consumers know what the profit levels are that these companies are operating at. If they're operating at profits margins of 50% to 100%, just the news of that is going to bring down the prices and interest rates the next day. But if it doesn't, then the government steps in and goes further.
Secondly, consumers pay for all of the advocacy of financial institutions and the other companies. Why? Because these companies can easily add a loonie or a toonie to their charges or a percentage point to their interest rates and raise millions of dollars--tens of millions and hundreds of millions of dollars overall across the industry because they have 25 million customers.
How do you balance that out? Well, we're sitting here as consumer groups with very limited budgets, trying to interest people and get them to join in support across the country. It's very difficult. We can't just add a loonie or a toonie to some bill we're sending them like the institutions can. So at no cost to the industry or the government, the government can require these companies to enclose a one-page pamphlet like this one, like the magazines used to use. It's a lick-and-stick. It would describe the group and invite people to join. They'd stick their cheque in and send it back.
Twenty-five million Canadians would receive it. If only 3% responded, there would be a group of 750,000 members. If there were a $40 membership fee, the group would have a $30 million budget. Then you would have a group that people could call, that could help them shop around, and that could be here participating in policy-making processes. It could also help people complain. It could do a ton of financial literacy work that no other organization could possibly do as effectively as a group that's run and funded by consumers themselves.
Then you need an overall audit of competition as well.
Do those three things and you'll actually have effective accountability, fair treatment, and fair prices.
