Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for her question. The member raised the issue of surtaxes on banks and in the same breath spoke of service charges.
I wonder if the hon. member can tell me if she thinks the surtax raised service charges for small businesses or lowered them. Did the proceeds from that surtax get passed on to Canadian taxpayers or did they simply go to fund ever rising interest payments on the debt?
In both cases the consumer got nailed. Those surtaxes came back to people in the form of higher service charges, higher interest rates. That is how the banks made up the difference. Because the federal government has been so slow to pay down its debt and allows anything that comes in in the form of revenue to simply be spent right away, we are paying more because it has waited so long to deal with the debt and the deficit problem.