Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to support my colleague in this respect, and I think the hon. member of the Reform Party should realize this is a bill to protect the individual consumer who borrows money, not companies. If I understood correctly, the bill is not concerned with companies but individuals.
We all know that financial institutions, with their expertise, can easily predict the vagaries of interest rates and are in a better position to take advantage of that expertise than the average citizen who has to make a living and does not have the resources to be able to judge when he should pay up his mortgage or take out a mortgage and for what period of time, and so forth.
That is why I think the flexibility the hon. member for Chambly is seeking, to allow people to pay back their mortgages and renegotiate them at a lower rate, would give the average citizen, for whom a mortgage on his home is the only equity he has, a chance to borrow a certain amount using the mortgage as collateral, in order to save some money for later on when he retires.
As the hon. member for Chambly explained, in the past we have often seen people lose huge sums of money, mainly because here in Canada we have a major problem. If we look at the mid-seventies we had interest rates at fairly reasonable levels of 7, 8 or 9 per cent. In 1981, 1982, 1983, interest rates rose to 20 per cent and then went down to 7, 8 and 9 per cent, and then down to 6 per cent in 1994. Last year, you could get a mortgage at 6 per cent, and now we are up to 11 and 12 per cent.
Imagine what we have to cope with. I did not do a serious analysis of the situation in other countries, but I know that in the United States, you can still get a 30-year mortgage at a much lower rate than we pay here. This kind of stability means that wage earners with fairly stable incomes can budget their money better. In this country, however, with these tremendous variations in interest rates, people never know where they stand.
So if we gave individuals, since we are talking about private mortgages, if we gave individuals a chance to at least budget for their interest payments, it would help them balance their budgets generally, give them greater confidence, and make them more inclined to engage in real estate transactions, and in the process, this would help the economy. I think that this is what the hon. member for Chambly had in mind when he introduced this bill, and I think this is important, but unfortunately, it would seem this bill is being snubbed.
I think we should have had more time to discuss the bill and a chance to improve certain guarantees available to individuals.
Once again, financial institutions are very well organized. They have their own experts who are able to evaluate the trends and the way interest rates are going, but the average Joe who has to learn a living does not have the resources to do this. That is why I support the bill standing in the name of the hon. member for Chambly.