Mr. Speaker, I just want to say a very few words. Bill C-20 respecting the Competition Act is a bill I have had some experience with in the past.
There are a couple of good things in it. I will get the good things out of the way quickly because I want to provide some suggestions as to how we can improve the bad things.
The telemarketing fraud section is a good amendment. A number of seniors in my constituency in the province of Saskatchewan have been the victims of telemarketing fraud. As a matter of fact, it has been such a problem in western Canada that we have had to undertake to educate as many seniors as possible by sending out householders in my constituency to alert them to the potential problem of telemarketing fraud and what sort of action they can take if they receive calls or have been victims of this very nasty approach by suspicious so-called business people.
I also remind people that on CTV National News last night, David Goldhawk, a very well known crusader for many issues that are important to Canadians, in particular seniors, told a story about a senior citizen who was bilked out of a fair amount of money through telemarketing fraud. Through his intervention he was able to salvage most of the money she had been fraudulently bilked of. I wanted to mention that in my remarks.
With respect to the other parts of the bill with which I am not so happy, they pertain mostly to the merger notification process. It is my view that the merger notification process in the bill is inadequate and very weak. It does not address the real problems that I think Canadians want addressed. It is my view that it should be done in a way which strengthens the legislation as opposed to weakening it as it now does.
I want to make a very brief comment about the changes in Bill C-20 that are not necessarily attractive to me when it comes to mergers. Right now, as my colleague from Qu'Appelle outlined, the big bank merger before the country and parliament is an issue very near and dear to the hearts of many Canadians. Many people bank with those two institutions and have a lot of friends, relatives, neighbours, acquaintances and so on who are employed there. These mergers could potentially cost jobs.
I am wondering whether the government of the day, which has put forward these recommendations, has given any consideration to this aspect where mergers result in fewer jobs. As I read through the bill and through the accompanying notes of the minister, I found that this issue was not addressed at all.
I want to make reference in particular to how Bill C-20 deals with the Conrad Black and Hollinger takeover of Saskatchewan newspapers. In essence they purchased the Leader-Post , the Star-Phoenix and the Yorkton Enterprise , basically all the daily newspapers in the province.
Under the Competition Act, which we are now debating, this was processed.
The purchaser of the newspapers, Mr. Black from Hollinger Inc., would sit down and say “Here are the benefits of a merger”. In fact, the Competition Bureau would sit down with them and say “Here is a process in which you can undertake to accomplish the merger”.
Other than that, they have no responsibility to ensure that basic services are required or that some of the employees who will lose their jobs should be provided with alternate training or some sort of severance arrangement, enabling them to gain employment in other parts of the country.
I am very concerned about this in relation to jobs in particular because mergers, whether the newspaper mergers of Conrad Black and his company Hollinger Inc. or the bank issue before the House of Commons, will result in significant numbers of families being affected.
It is estimated that for the bank merger alone, somewhere between 15,000 and 30,000 jobs are potentially at risk. I think that is a serious enough implication of a merger that the House of Commons and the Government of Canada should be taking a review of this matter.
I join with my colleague, the member for Qu'Appelle, in calling for a parliamentary committee to ensure that the mergers (a), are necessary, and (b), are going to be beneficial to the country that provides them with the charters to bank in the first place.
It is my sense that the resulting review of the merger situation does not provide satisfactory evidence and that it will benefit Canadians and people working in Canada if the merger is allowed to proceed anyway.
Maybe we can provide other people who will provide banking services to Canadians with the charters that they are due and entitled to under the Bank Act.
Of course where these jobs will be lost will be all over Canada but mostly in rural Canada, in small town Canada, particularly in communities where both the Bank of Montreal and the Royal Bank have branches.
I wonder, when we are considering a merger and we have the commissioner of the mergers reviewing the merger, why we cannot have a commission and a Competition Act that asks merging companies how many jobs the merger will create in this country as opposed to how many jobs will be lost. There should be some regulation about that.
Maybe we should have in this Competition Act some sections that call for a community reinvestment act. That would be a novel idea. It means that if they are going to merge or move an amount of capital around, they should be answering about how many dollars should be reinvested in the communities where they made their profits. That would ensure there is certain economic activity and that they were returning some of those profits to the community where they were earned.
People in parts of Canada say “This is just another left wing idea”. It is not that left wing. It is actually in existence in many countries in this world. The home of free enterprise and capitalism, the U.S.A., has a reinvestment act, the Community Reinvestment Act.
When the Bank of Montreal bought the Morgan Bank in Chicago just a few years ago, before the purchase of the Morgan Bank was allowed to proceed under U.S. regulations, the Bank of Montreal had to commit $497 million to reinvestment in Chicago and district alone because that is where the Morgan Bank was servicing clients.
It had to commit $497 million over a period of time. I believe it was over five years. They had to invest in small business, in low cost housing and in other areas where they were getting a return. It had to commit that amount of money to reinvest in those communities.
Why can we in this Competition Act which we are debating today not have sections that would encourage, if not provide, an opportunity for a reinvestment act in this country? I think Canadians would welcome this. They would embrace this act. I would assure the government opposite that the NDP would certainly support that initiative.
I want to leave these recommendations with the government. I think they are very important. I also want to say that the Competition Act should also consider the MAI, the Multilateral Agreement on Investment.
The Multilateral Agreement on Investment will affect the Competition Act. If the Competition Act is in law and is operating in this country, will the MAI supersede an act of this Parliament with respect to competition? We do not know the answer to that. I hope the government will respond to it. Although the Competition Act is fairly weak, we should be mindful of the opportunities and the challenges which the MAI will provide with respect to this particular issue.
The final point I want to make pertains to the lack of teeth in this bill. I have brought forward issues in the House of Commons such as gas pricing, where the competition bureau reviews superficially gas pricing practices in this country, but does not have the authority to go into corporations to look at documents like it used to be able to do under the Combines Investigation Act, which was abolished by the former Conservative government of Mr. Mulroney.
That legislation was abolished because, from the large corporations' perspective, it was intrusive. Of course intrusive meant that the anti-combines people could in effect look at mergers or the purchasing of companies to ensure that the public interest was defended and protected. Consumers were protected and defended. Now that legislation is gone and we have the Competition Act, which is a shadow of its former self.
Even the United States of America has anti-combines legislation on its books to this day. There is more powerful legislation in the homeland of capitalism, in the land of free enterprise, than we have in the so-called social democratic country of Canada.