Thank you, Mr. Chair.
The Competition Bureau recently reported that the lack of competition in this country is worse than it's been at any time in the last quarter of a century, leading to higher prices for consumers and higher profits for corporate oligarchs across the board, and that competitive intensity is on the decline.
Now, after eight long years, this Liberal government is considering allowing Canada's biggest bank to gobble up the seventh-biggest bank to eliminate competition in an industry that already lacks sufficient competition and force up mortgage rates for Canadians, who already can't afford to pay their bills.
Today I also searched mortgage rates for both HSBC and RBC. The two-year fixed rate at HSBC was 40 basis points lower than at RBC. The five-year fixed rate at HSBC was 35 basis points lower than at the Royal Bank.
Competition works. We need Canadian banks to compete for customers, not buy them, but if the biggest banks in Canada simply buy up growing players, there's no hope for there ever to be more competition in Canadian banking. There are already too few financial institutions in the banking sector as it is.
The Competition Bureau found that HSBC's mortgage business was a rate disrupter in the Canadian market. Removing this competition could raise banking fees when life is already unaffordable. If you have a smaller competitor pulling down rates, then we should want them to remain in place; instead, this merger lets the biggest bank in Canada gobble up 800,000 customers without having to offer those customers anything for their business. Worse, when those new customers, who will then be Royal Bank of Canada customers, go to renew their mortgages, they'll be stuck with the higher Royal Bank of Canada rates that I mentioned.
We have to ensure that if the government is protecting large domestic industries, those industries are forced to compete against each other to win over customers based on product and price, not consolidate power and bulldoze over customer interest.
Mr. Chair, if 70,000 mortgages are being renewed at higher rates every month in this country, as mortgage defaults creep up, people are starting to lose their homes. That's why competition to keep rates as low as possible is so important, and why Conservatives are calling on this merger to be denied. We call on the Minister of Finance to deny this anti-competitive merger.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.