Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to the hon. member's presentation.
I purchased my first business when I was 18 years old. Throughout all of my life save for about five years I have been in and out of small business and consider myself somewhat of an entrepreneur. The definition of that as an entrepreneur through your life you have some winners and some losers but at the end of the day you hope you have more winners than losers. Fortunately I lucked out from hard work, but through all those years my biggest competitors were the bankers.
I listened to the hon. member talk about proposals and that the banks are going to do studies and they are going to talk about this and talk about that. They have been doing that for years.
I particularly remember the period of the great recession in early 1982 when the Bank of Commerce had a multimillion dollar television campaign with Anne Murray telling all small businesses in Canada that the Bank of Commerce was their friend. I was operating a business then and fortunately I was not really caught in the recession. One day I got a call from my banker who said: "Dick, we are going to cut your credit line in half". When I asked why, he said: "We have just been advised we have to raise some capital".
The banks can talk all they want about programs and plans. The government can talk all it wants about how much it is talking to the banks, but nothing is going to happen to help small business until the monopoly of the big five bankers in this country is threatened or broken up.
The hon. member said that the government has met with the CEOs of the major banks and they have promised to look at improving banking practices in relation to small business. That is fine, but my question is, improving banking practices or what? What kind of hammer is the government going to hold over these bankers to make sure they do?
If the government would dare to suggest to the big five who have this country in a monopolistic grip when it comes to finance, if it would threaten to open up the banking industry to private enterprise, to competition, to regional banks that would specialize in small business financing, that would be the biggest incentive for the banks to start looking seriously at small business. As long as the banks hold all the cards, as long as they are contributing millions of dollars to the two old line parties to help them with their election costs, they are never going to give up their monopoly and small business is never ever going to get any benefit or relief from the banking industry in this country.