Mr. Speaker, I am glad to rise in the House to talk about Bill C-91, which aims at changing the function and mandate of the Federal Business Development Bank and at renaming it the Business Development Bank of Canada.
I have a few questions to ask about the bill. It is a bit disturbing because the Federal Business Development Bank as we know it works very well.
I met its president in Quebec City. As we know, the Bank lends almost one third of its money-about $1.3 billion-in Quebec. Finally, it serves very well its purpose of bank of last resort. Moreover, the Federal Business Development Bank, as it is now, gives training courses for people who want to start new businesses. These are excellent courses and many Quebec entrepreneurs have taken them. Right now, the bank is self-financing and does not cost Canadian taxpayers one penny.
Nonetheless, Bill C-91 will change the mandate of the bank and radically transform its capital structure. The bank now has a statutory borrowing limit of about $3.2 billion but it is proposed to eliminate that limit and to allow the new bank to borrow as much as it wants. I will come back to that later. This change in the capital structure is disturbing because it will allow the bank to enter into partnership with other organizations and other banks.
The capital structure and the mandate of the bank will be changed completely. Right now, the bank is a last resort lender. It makes loans to business people who cannot borrow from commercial banks via the usual channels. There is a real need for that kind of service. But the Federal Business Development Bank will not necessarily have this last resort mandate any longer since the new mandate will require the FBDB to support other projects through partnerships or through top-up funding. This compromises its original mandate which was to offer last resort funding to businesses.
This is quite disturbing because one has to wonder who will do this job if the Federal Business Development Bank is no longer doing it. If the FBDB changes its mandate and works increasingly in partnership with other banks, who will take over the mandate that is presently carried out so efficiently by the Federal Business Development Bank? It is just as though all last resort cases will be ignored.
But the most troubling question regarding this bill relates to the government's motive for introducing it. Why is the government proposing to change the bank's capital structure and mandate? Why is it removing the loan ceiling and telling the bank not to be a last resort lending institution any longer but to go into partnership with other banks and other agencies in projects related mainly to small and medium size businesses
and exports? There are good reasons for trying to find out the motive for such changes.
Do we really want to help small and medium size businesses or do we want to compete with existing financial institutions? We have to ask the question because this bill allows the Federal Business Development Bank, under its new mandate, to compete directly with existing financial institutions. It is troubling.
In fact, should the federal government compete with the private sector? The government has already made such an attempt in another bill, Bill C-52 brought forward by the Minister of Public Works, giving itself the power to compete directly with engineering and architecture firms. Strangely enough, this bill was withdrawn when we started to criticize the government after realizing that these engineering and architecture firms were concentrated in Quebec. We realized that 90 per cent of the businesses that the government would compete with were located in Quebec, and that is why the bill was withdrawn.
But the government is at it again, giving the Federal Business Development Bank a similar but broader mandate since we are no longer talking about one sector, engineering and architecture, but almost any kind of partnership for economic development. And anybody who takes the time to read the definition of the mandate in clauses 20 and 21 will see that it is very broad. There are no limits to this new bank's mandate.
This is what is troubling, because we know that some of the best examples of the growth of small and medium size businesses in Canada have been in Quebec. It is well known that, if there is one sector in Quebec that has distinguished itself, and is on the cutting edge, it is the small and medium size business sector.
We have established funds in Quebec for the development of small and medium size business, such as the solidarity funds of the FTQ and the CNTU, and a number of programs, such as those of the caisses populaires. It is a very active sector. Why, then, is Canada changing the mandate of the Federal Business Development Bank in order to enter this sector? Does it want to compete with Quebec's caisses populaires? Does it want to compete with the solidarity funds of the FTQ and the CNTU?
Ultimately, can it overstep the authority of the province, which has already established a regional development program, in order to once again increase the visibility of the federal government in Quebec, as it has done elsewhere in Canada furthermore, but particularly in Quebec? Is there a hidden agenda in this bill, a deliberate wish to weaken the many programs that have been established in Quebec by the banks and the solidarity funds, as well as the programs established by the Quebec government itself?
These are some of the questions that come to mind with respect to Bill C-91. There is no compelling need for the Federal Business Development Bank to have a new mandate, when the one it now has is perfectly sufficient. One could wonder whether beyond the economic purpose of this bill there is not another deeper political purpose. That, in fact, is why I personally will not support this bill. Basically, the purpose of this bill is a purely political one. Coming from Quebec, from the riding of Québec-Est, I can see that the Federal Business Development Bank, this new bank, holds nothing for us. It would be better to keep it in its present form.