Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the member for Broadview-Greenwood. I have always been interested in what he says. We do not always agree 100 per cent of the time, but basically our orientations are in the right area, which is to increase capital for small and medium sized businesses.
The member is absolutely right. Banks in this country have forgotten just what they were doing. Banks originally started off many centuries ago investing in ideas. They invested in people's grey matter. They invested in their ideas about making life better and increasing people's standards of living. I have noticed that banks now invest in financial transactions. Our banks in North America are very oriented toward paper currency transactions. Indeed, I think if we were to study the balance sheets of most of our banks we would see a high percentage of their assets being held in government securities, et cetera. This has become a linkage in the global environment.
The reality is that these debts and financial instruments do not do anything. They do not create any more jobs. They do not create or take a piece of technological science and turn it into something useful.
What do we see in North America? We see people like Bill Gates, who had to work out of his garage to get his ideas going. People have to go and find others who will give $50 to buy so many shares and maybe later on some of that will come back. The banks say that sounds pretty wild.
I have a specific example of this in my own riding. I had the pleasure only last week of congratulating an entrepreneur for winning the Canadian woman entrepreneur of the year award in the area of export. This woman many years ago was my client. She was making strips of fur and putting them on strings. I must admit that even to me it sounded ridiculous at the time. What she did with that was to create a reversible fur coat. I went to various banks for her, and they said: "What are you going to give us as security, strips of fur? Get out of here." Do you know who finally picked up this account? It was a bank from England, not a Canadian bank.
That woman today employs hundreds of people. It is a small business in my riding that has given jobs in basically a rural area. Her product is shipped all over the world, mainly to Japan and Southeast Asia. She is creating jobs and hard currency exchange for our government and our country without the support of banks.
Yes, the member is absolutely right. This whole attitude in our banking system has to change. We have to get on board and support our small and medium business sector.