Thank you, Chair.
I think it's in the vein of some of the witness testimony today, so I thank you, witnesses.
We are in a wrecking ball between a housing crisis and a competition crisis in Canada. We have a major competition problem. A Competition Bureau report released this week stated what we already knew for the last 25 years—competition has never been worse in Canada. Canadians pay some of the highest fees in the world for cellphone bills, for groceries, for airlines and for banking.
When it comes to banking, we have a highly consolidated industry and large oligopolies that control all the banking in Canada.
At the same time, we have a competition reform problem and a policy problem. That's evident because the federal government itself has just launched Bill C-56, which addresses competition reform, and there's a private member's bill by the leader of the NDP. There is a competition problem, and we have to address that.
At the same time, we have a merger right now. Canada's number one bank, with a 23% market share in mortgages, is trying to buy Canada's number seven bank, which represents 800,000 mortgages, mostly in Vancouver and Toronto.
To give an indication of that, HSBC has 10% of all the Vancouver mortgages on the books, and roughly 5% of Toronto's.
When we look at the difference between mortgages for a family in Vancouver or Toronto who had a half-million-dollar mortgage—and that's probably pretty low for most families—we see that the variable mortgage rate posted today from HSBC is 6.4%, and from RBC it's 7.15%. That's a difference of 75 basis points. That didn't really matter two years ago during the pandemic, but when interest rates have risen, 75 basis points is a lot for any family.
To give that context, for a family that's going to be over $300 more just on that basis point difference on a half-million-dollar mortgage. If you compare that to a family that right now is at 1.8% or 2% and has to refinance a mortgage—which 70,000 families are now doing every month—you can imagine the pain the families would have in trying to make that relevant to their family budgets and their lives. No wonder we're seeing a lot of families in all cities across Canada screaming that they simply can't afford that.
With regard to this merger itself, certainly HSBC is a scrappy competitor that offers competitive rates in the market. However, the Competition Bureau itself stated, in giving approval, that it's doing so under the current rules and that in competition reform, we have to change the Competition Act.
During the competition reform that the government started and that all parties have agreed to look at, when we're looking at a housing crisis—and borrowing from Mayor Guthrie, who said that the day of reckoning has come—we have to have an intervention by this government right now to ensure that a scrappy competitor can stay in the market and offer lower mortgage prices for Canadians. If that competitor is removed, there's nothing that's going to be worse than having higher mortgage fees and interest rates for consumers and Canadian families.
We're asking the finance minister to reject this deal and we're asking this committee to support this motion.