Mr. Speaker, I applaud the comments of the member for Willowdale. I agree completely with everything that he said. The opening comments of my speech on this issue were reflective of that.
Getting to the issue at hand, co-insurance is very important. It is important because there has to be accountability in the marketplace and a responsibility if we are going to have monetary controls, if we are going to be able to give people any sense of comfort.
We must end in a way with the small depositor in particular, having some form of protection. As I pointed out in my speech, the difficulty of having 100 per cent protection and not having co-insurance is that the government then has to step into the monetary market to an extent that the small investor is absolved of responsibility for his or her investment decisions.
That is bad because money is not moral, money is not national. Money is neither of those things. Money is a way of exchanging value within the entire world community. To isolate depositors to federally controlled institutions from the reality of that is to introduce into Canada a system of insulating us from the reality of trading money.
I point out that there is an almost universal consensus for co-insurance. In spite of diverse interests, the banks, the insurance industry, both the present and the past superintendents, the chairman of the CDIC, the Canadian Institute of Actuaries, academics, including most recently the Public Interest Advocacy Centre which studied the issue from the consumer's point of view and the Senate banking commission, have supported co-insurance.
In light of this virtual universal acceptance of the idea of co-insurance, would the member who is the chairman of the Standing Committee on Finance support an amendment put forward at report stage by the Reform Party to seek co-insurance, instead of what is currently proposed in this bill?