Thank you, Mr. Chair.
If I lose my voice, I apologize, but with two toddlers at home bringing home all kinds of illnesses, seemingly on a daily basis.... I apologize.
Hello. My name is Alex Holman, and I'm the founder of Spirit Foundation Financial Technology Inc. We're a fintech company focused on reconciliation with indigenous peoples.
I'm here to share my experience of attempting to launch financial products that reflect the reality of Canada as a nation. The reality is that we are transacting on indigenous land and have stolen the value of that land to create financial products. All of this is being done while individuals living on reserve are unable to own their own homes, and they have their spending power continuously eroded by a fiat currency, the Canadian dollar, which is backed primarily by debt and low interest rates previously on that same stolen land.
We live in a world where just the performance-based bonuses for bankers in Canada are close to $20 billion per year. This is roughly half the size of the entire indigenous economy.
In January 2020, I connected with the Bank of Montreal after an incident that saw the arrest of Maxwell Johnson and his granddaughter at their downtown Vancouver location. We spoke about everything I just shared with you and about the need for real reform in the financial sector. We discussed the idea of a digital asset, similar to Bitcoin, to alleviate the economic problems on reserve. Over the next three years, we would work on numerous projects, all of which eventually became dead ends.
In January 2023, BMO reached out and asked me if I would like to launch an Affinity credit card. After agreeing, we got to work on the program, which would be promoted at the indigenous summer games in Halifax. Features included sharing a portion of the interchange fees with indigenous-led charities, extra cash back for supporting indigenous-led businesses and, for the first time, traditional indigenous names on credit cards. We had strong partners supporting us who were willing to fund the marketing, and the card was set to launch in November 2023.
In May 2023, BMO shared that the Spirit-BMO Affinity card program was to be cut because of BMO's merger with California's Bank of the West. It asked if I'd be willing to stay on and work on the project for a few more years, without compensation and without a firm launch date. We never received any compensation from BMO. Internal dialogues at BMO failed to produce a positive result for the program.
We often wonder why Canada fails to innovate like other G20 countries. We wonder why our banking system is so expensive and why reconciliation is stalled with platitudes and broken promises. It's ventures like Spirit that are being cut in favour of corporate takeovers. We had ample evidence to suggest a large portion of Canadians are interested in reconciliation-focused financial products.
The failure extends beyond retail products and into capital markets as well. It's currently much easier to invest in clean-water infrastructure in places like Africa than it is on a reserve in your own province that's had a boil water advisory for up to 30 years.
We made attempts to ask the BMO capital markets team about how we might invest in some of the bonds that support first nations, and it actually didn't know how. We have zero innovation in Canada when it comes to connecting investors with first nations, Inuit and Métis communities. Most Canadians will go their entire lives with no economic relationship with their closest indigenous communities.
There is no difference between building a pipeline on indigenous land or using indigenous land to back financial products like mortgages. Indigenous peoples have a place in regulating, forming and ultimately seeing the value from financial products created on their unceded, traditional and treaty lands.
BMO is a 206-year-old bank that essentially invented the Canadian dollar. It operated as Canada's central bank all the way through Confederation up to the 1930s, while we were systematically destroying indigenous peoples' culture through the residential school system. It also financed the construction of the railway, which seized millions of acres of indigenous land.
Colonization didn't just happen. We needed to turn indigenous land into Canadian land and give that land value. We needed to entice millions of people from around the world to come to Canada and convince them that the land and the currency they were getting was real.
Despite all of these gains over the centuries, the refusal to launch a simple credit card supporting indigenous people is a disgrace, and more so that it's in favour of a $16-billion foreign bank acquisition that should have no effect on Canadian operations. Reconciliation in the financial sector is not about removing barriers to indigenous people in the workplace. That is called following the law, and making efforts to not discriminate against your own indigenous employees and customers is absolutely the bare minimum.
We need bold, decisive strategies focused on raising the standard of living on reservations to match that of the rest of Canada. I would implore the federal government that, when mergers and corporate takeovers are being discussed and looking for approval, innovative products and ventures supporting indigenous communities must not be cut.
Thank you.