Mr. Speaker, as far as I am aware no other caucus has undertaken any review of the financial services sector and has tried to piggy-back on some of the work of our caucus.
This was a very extensive consultation. As I indicated in my main speech, we did it through 7 different cities with 150 witnesses. We did all this on our own budgets and on time outside of the House and outside of our committee responsibilities.
I have to commend the members who participated in that task force because I think it made a very useful contribution to the dialogue.
With respect to the second question on tied selling, the report is divided into two parts. The first part deals with mergers. The process of the dialogue has been hijacked by the merger discussions.
The second part of the report deals with a number of contributions by a variety of members on issues such as bank governance, competitiveness, community credit unions, et cetera. My contribution was in the area of tied selling. I appreciated the responsiveness by the Secretary of State for Financial Institutions in looking into that area and making amendments to section 459 of the Bank Act so that the area of coercive tied selling is something Canadians can be somewhat comforted about.
In my paper my argument is essentially that when a Canadian has a complaint about coercive tied selling there be a reverse onus. This would mean that the person is presumed to be correct in his legitimate complaint and then the bank has the onus to say that the individual was not coercibly tied sold.
Cross-selling is of benefit to all of us. We get benefits in rates and in terms and conditions. However, coercive tied selling is an area that we need to continue to monitor.
My argument is that we need to look at the issue of a Canadian financial ombudsman and whether it is an appropriate area for the government to go into. This is also an area of jurisdiction for a Canadian financial services ombudsman. The idea of a reverse onus would level the playing field and allow all of us to feel comfort that as an unequally resourced Canadian we can deal with the overly resourced financial institution.