Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to the witnesses for being here this morning.
Perhaps I'll make a statement on the banks, because I hear what Mr. Daignault says about Canadian banks going abroad.
It's absolutely correct, as Mr. Lake pointed out, that Canadian banks may be on a sounder footing than those of their international competitors, so thank goodness we didn't allow them to merge 10 years ago. Somebody had some foresight, it seems to me, when they opposed those mergers when someone decided to bring them up. I'm glad we were able to make folks understand that.
But I love revisionist history. It's always marvellous stuff. I actually studied history and political science in university, so revisionist history is always a great thing.
But when you talk about supporting banks as they go abroad, it seems to me that a few of them, not all of them, also got themselves exposed to some risk that perhaps they wouldn't have exposed themselves to had they been using the same sort of risk management techniques in this country when they ventured abroad and had stuff on their balance sheet.
And I call it “stuff” because, really, that's what it is these days. I don't think it has any intrinsic value, and it probably didn't have any intrinsic value at the time. So I'll call it stuff, for want of a better term, because there's a whole pile of it, whether it be ABCP or whether it be other derivatives or any other kind of mechanism. It's a bunch of stuff, and the market has difficulty in measuring what exactly it is worth. That has washed itself back into what I would call the real economy, where folks actually make things and supply services to us in this country and to those abroad, and has caused our folks who are involved in real economy—which eventually means workers, and those who work for a living—to feel the adverse effects of that stuff causing them to be unemployed and businesses to actually close and go into bankruptcy, receivership, and just disappear.
Based on all of that, as I looked through your presentation, Ms. Métivier, you say here that about 3% of the Canadian term lending market is the approximate piece of the market that BDC has. It would seem to me that at any given moment in time, 3% may have indeed been a decent piece to play in when the economy was sort of moving along. But at this moment in time it seems to me that's lacking. And I don't think that's a fault of the BDC, and I want to make that clear: I don't believe that's the case. But it seems to me—and I'd like your comment around it—that if indeed we can't get the regular lending institutions to actually come back into the market in a meaningful way that will help our exporters, manufacturers, and service industries, do you see a greater role for the BDC to play in the economy that is greater than 3%?