Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Welcome to the committee, Mr. Singh. It is a pleasure to see you.
Congratulations on introducing your bill.
Obviously, you have focused on grocery stores, since that is the issue of the year. We understand that it is important, but your bill would change the competition rules for all industries, so I would like to talk to you, as my Conservative colleague did, about the open banking system.
You know that the banks today are having to become manufacturers of financial products, and there are apps where customers go to buy them and use them. So there needs to be legislation and regulations to regulate all of that, actually. You know that the budget, which you supported, contained an intention to regulate the open banking system. You also know, since you are a very well-informed man, that our biggest financial institution in Quebec, Desjardins, is owned by the Government of Quebec.
The government's bill seems to contain the intention to impose a framework and hold a gun to Desjardins' temple and simply tell it to choose between adhering to the federal framework and being isolated on its own. There seems to have been no coordination with the Government of Quebec in order to harmonize all of this.
What is your position? Would you be prepared to support a bill about the open banking system for which there was no coordination with the Government of Quebec in order to take the biggest employer in Quebec and our biggest financial institution into consideration?
Would you support a bill like that?