Mr. Speaker, the subject of Bill C-15 certainly is not the area of my expertise. I want to approach this from the standpoint of the lay person, talking about the banking system, the insurance system and what they mean to Canadians.
We all recognize the value of a stable banking and insurance system. That is necessary in our society. If we look at the disruption the United States has in its fiscal system, none of us would want to ascribe to it.
When we look at this bill we find that there are a number of key problem areas. The key to monitoring our financial institutions and ensuring their financial health is the question we should be addressing.
Ensuring Canadians do not get conned into putting their money into shaky financial institutions which go on to collapse is of extreme importance to us. Every time one of these financial or insurance institutions goes under we all feel the repercussions. It costs millions of dollars to insure this does not happen, and over the years there have been a great many problems.
The CDIC has often had to step in to cover the $60,000 insured limit on deposited moneys.
I think back to my experience in Alberta. When the Principal Group went under the grandmothers, the farmers and the general public that had put their money into that institution were left not knowing if they would get 10 cents on the dollar or 50 cents on the dollar or what would happen to them.
Many people at that time said that was greed, that those people invested in the Principal Group because it paid one per cent more or one-half per cent more. I would not call that greed, I would call that human nature. People will look at institutions with a view to putting money into them based on what kind of return they can get. Seniors are most affected, as they were in my community by the collapse of the Principal Group. That is what we have to address. We must ask how much information the general public should have on all our financial institutions.
Let us examine Bill C-15. It seeks to improve the rules regarding financial institutions. Unfortunately it does not deliver on this very well. Like so many of the bills we have had before us in the House, it goes part of the way in doing the job but does not go far enough. That is either because of political reasons or because of lack of information. Perhaps there is too much reliance on the bureaucracy and not enough on the hard work of committees and of the minister.
Anyone leafing through the bill will notice it is quite complex. It runs 136 pages. When we take this amount of legal jargon and add it to the existing legislation we get an almost indecipherable collection of material nobody except a few lawyers really understand.
Over the three years I have been here I have noticed that when we do this to bills, we leave things open to interpretation, we leave things open to confusion. Many people will look at it differently. The government has to return to communicating with people in people's language. Lawyers, accountants and bankers have created an industry out of complexity.
Whether our tax system, our banking system or any of these systems, we are looking at getting legislation back to the people so the people can understand it and can deal with it. We should not have to hire experts. When we do that we leave ourselves open to the abuse we so often hear about from our constituents.
The bill is very complex. It is an opaque bill and does not address the fundamental problems surrounding financial institutions. That is why my colleagues and I are not supporting the bill. We do not think Bill C-15 is evil or malicious, but we do not think the government has taken the right approach of putting it in language people can understand. I do not believe it could be that difficult to express the bill in a legalese we could understand and approach.
What is this simple approach we are talking about? It is very important the system be understandable, open and accountable to Canadians. This is the exact opposite of what I see when I try to read Bill C-15.
The current system is so arcane that no ordinary person can make head or tail of it. Even if some brave soul wanted to find the various ins and outs, the information simply is not available. It is confidential, it is off limits, it is out of bounds and it is something individuals should not have. In other words, there is no transparency and no accountability. It is no wonder Canadians do not have much faith in the way things are going and are currently being done.
I come back to the tax laws as an example: 2,100 pages of gobbledegook. I look at our Constitution and see more gobbledegook. We have to relate to clause this and clause that as of this date and that date and so on. Businesses and individuals cannot understand it. Accountants have to take courses every month just to understand the changes that are being made.
Let me relate one of the proposals in Bill C-15 that has some potential. It suggests that risk should be a determining factor in assessing premiums for the CDIC. That seems to be a really good idea. Everyone in this House understands that a high risk company should pay higher premiums. The inverse of this is true as well. The more secure the institution, the less the premium should be. This is common practice when it comes to insurance.
Unfortunately though, the CDIC would not make these risk assessments available to the public. If this were open, transparent and made available, then people could plan their investments accordingly. They would know the level of risk they were taking and it would be totally up front. They would have no one to blame but themselves if they decided to make that riskier investment with the higher premium rates.
There is no transparency. The way it is now is secretive which makes it impossible for Canadians to make informed decisions. I think we hear that no matter what area we talk about. Canadians need things to be transparent and open.
I know many of the hon. members on the government side have a fair amount of money. We have heard that mentioned on occasion. Many of them are even what we might call wealthy. I would like to ask those people, if they were putting their hard earned dollars into a particular bank or trust company and they knew the CDIC had done a risk assessment on that institution, would they not want to know what the assessment said? Does it not make common sense that it would be public information that one institution was riskier than another?
That sort of thing should be public information. That is why the public loses confidence and trust in politicians and in politics itself. We do not seem to open up this information to assessment. The
public has a right to have that assessment and to have it made public. We need to know who is reliable and who is not.
When there is one of these big financial collapses and the taxpayer is left holding the bag, would those people who have made that decision not be angry if they realized that CDIC had known all along the company was a risky bet? Would people not wonder why the CDIC had kept that secret?
I think back to what I talked about earlier, the example in Alberta where the grandmothers, the farmers and so many other people lost their savings. We heard that the experts knew it was risky, but that little grandmother out there sure did not know it was risky. How could she know since that information is confidential? It is secret information. As I pointed out at the start, if nothing else, just to get this into the layman's language so the layman understands it we have to open it up and make it transparent.
I would like to go back to what I earlier called a simple approach to this. It involves a transparent and accountable system. One of the best ways to build accountability into a system is through co-insurance. This has been introduced but has not been followed up on. It is not part of the bill and was rejected.
How can this be? It would seem everyone agrees that we need transparency, accountability and a right to know when a company is a risk and when it is not. What is wrong with co-insurance? Why is it not there? Again it comes back to the fact that we are not going far enough. We are just touching the edges.
Many of the things we do are little political decisions where we said we would do a little bit, so we do a little bit. There is no vision, no long term plan. There is nothing there.