Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Good morning, Mr. Carney and Mr. Jenkins.
Earlier, when you were answering my colleague Mr. Laforest's question, you said that financial institutions need to show good financial citizenship because they have broader responsibilities. That was the gist of your comment. Most observers today are saying that as soon as the economy started to rebound, American financial institutions, in particular, went back to behaving the same way they had before.
Is it too much to hope that financial institutions might show good corporate citizenship with respect to their activities? The current economic crisis was caused by the fact that financial institutions, particularly American ones, took enormous risks without the reserves they needed to deal with those risks.
The same can be said for big companies. GM and Chrysler are just two examples of many large companies that were not able to handle the crisis because they did not have enough in the way of reserves and were not reasonable in their planning. Ford, on the other hand, had the reserves it needed and was able to deal with the crisis.
Right now, observers are telling us that the system has not changed, not one bit. In Europe, they are considering imposing a capital tax on financial institutions. The same could apply to companies, in order to create some sort of insurance so that governments are not obligated to invest hundreds of billions of dollars—as was the case in the US—because of a crisis brought on by the irresponsible behaviour of the heads of corporations and financial institutions. I think we should establish some sort of insurance.
Mr. Carney, I would like to know if you are currently talking to the Department of Finance about the possibility of imposing a sort of capital tax that would ensure that we have a fund to deal with the irresponsible behaviour of some in the financial sector?