Madam Speaker, I would never want to forget that very important rule. As the Parliamentary Secretary to Minister of Finance pointed out, we are dealing with a technical bill. Perhaps they nodded off and did not pay much attention on the government side as to what was going on in the House because of the technicalities of the bill.
Before I was interrupted I was pointing out that the bill deals with bankers' acceptances and notes. They are second only in value to the value and volume of federal government instruments, bonds and so on which are dealt with by the financial industry. I pointed out how important raising money is for the vitality of our economy to create new jobs, to build new factories, to finance inventory and so on.
The act does not hold true for the federal government which just borrowed the money, spent it, poured it down the drain for little or no value whatsoever. Now we have high taxes. Our economy is being dragged down. We are less competitive than we otherwise would be around the world because the government never learned how to manage its books.
We expect organizations and companies that are borrowing money through bankers' acceptances and so on are able to manage their books properly. They do not have the concept of taxpayers standing behind them. They have only profits standing behind their capacity to pay the interest and repay the principal.
Over the last many years governments including this government have borrowed many billions of dollars. Since the government came to office in 1993 it has borrowed approximately $100 billion, to be precise.
That is an affront to all Canadians. We are the ones who end up paying the interest on the federal government debt whereas it is investors who earn the interest and corporations that pay the interest on the bankers' acceptances through the profits they have generated through extra economic activity they have been able to create, extra jobs they have been able to create, extra sales they have been able to create, and extra efficiencies, productivity and plants they have been able to build. That is how our financial industry works as a service to the industrial world to raise the money it needs in order for us to maintain a healthy economy.
The parliamentary secretary referred to the fact that rather than the instrument itself having to change hands, as is required under a bill of exchange, they just need a bookkeeping entry signed by both sides in the books of the depository to make the transaction legal. It is a bit of an indictment of the legal industry that has evolved over the past number of generations.
I return to the old definition of a bill of exchange, which I learned by heart as a young fellow when I studied banking in my native Scotland. The definition was brought to my attention again by the Library of Parliament. It jogged my mind about the definition of a bill of exchange which is:
An unconditional order in writing addressed by one person to another, signed by the person giving it, requiring the person to whom it is addressed to pay on demand or at a fixed or a determinable future time a sum certain in money to order or to bearer.
I know that because I had to learn it many years ago. The bill of exchange was a simple piece of paper, one sheet saying that one was owed an amount of money.
Today the instruments of debt are pages thick, sometimes books in length. Sometimes they refer to all the rest of the conditions posted in the head office of the organization. Therefore it becomes a physical impossibility to keep these books moving around. The legal industry has said to the financial industry that it will have to cover off this liability or that liability and ensure the section is covered and that it can collect the money under these circumstances. They keep getting bigger and bigger.
Now we have to move these books around, so we are going to put them in a depository. They are going to sit there in a depository. We are back to one piece of paper referring to the books in depository. We are now going to pass this piece of paper around for the financial industry.
When originally they passed the piece of paper around they did not need a depository. Now they do. In a few more generations I wonder where we will be putting this piece of paper which has now grown into a book. We will put that into a depository also. We will start off with another sheet of paper that refers to the bookkeeping entry which refers to the underlying agreement, and it goes and on. It is wonderful how the paper war does develop.
I appreciate that the financial industry does need to have some modernization. It does need to have this capacity to be able to work more efficiently, especially now that we are now in the computer age. Lots of these entries are now made by computer.
Let us remember too that today is April 27, 1998. We are less than two years away from the big bash, big blast of the millennium. On January 1, 2000, we are going to find out whose computer works and whose does not. Is the government going to be able to work, not efficiently on January 1, 2000, but at all on January 1, 2000? Or are all these computers going to grind to a stop?
The same applies to this depository we are talking about under Bill S-9, all handled by computers. As the parliamentary secretary said, there are billions of dollars flowing through this each day. What is going to happen on January 1, 2000 if the computer that handles the depository gives up the ghost, the federal government's computers give up the ghost and industry's computers give up the ghost? A half hour ago two people in my office were telling us that there is going to be a major economic catastrophe on January 1, 2000, predictable right to the very day.
It will not be the end of the growth period of the economic cycle that will end in a downturn. It is that the computers are going to grind to a stop on that day. Those people with accounts receivable will not be able to collect their money. Those people who have bills to pay will not be able to write the cheques.
The public accounts committee asked the Treasury Board secretariat last fall, Mr. Rummell, the chief information officer for the Government of Canada, and the assistant deputy minister in charge of information technology, what was the back-up if the computers fail in the year 2000. They said we will have to write the cheques by hand. Imagine such an admission by the Government of Canada. In this day and age when we are totally and absolutely reliant on computers to do virtually everything, the assistant deputy minister says they will have to write the cheques by hand. That is how unprepared the federal government and industry are in meeting this challenge which is right around the corner.
I was reading an article in the Financial Post this morning which said that this was one date that we could not play around with. We cannot postpone it. It will be here on January 1, 2000. When everyone is waking up from the hangover of the great celebration on the eve of the millennium, it is going to be a big bust the next day when the computer is turned on. That is the end of it. It dies. The economy could die too according the people in my office. There are going to be severe ramifications.
While we are talking on Bill S-9, and while we are talking about helping the financial industry improve its effectiveness and its efficiency, let us also send out a clear warning and strongly urge industry and everyone who has a computer to realize that January 2000 is not going to be postponed. If they want their business to survive and to continue making money in the new millennium they had better do a little housekeeping of their own as well as Bill S-9 to ensure their business continues in business on January 1, 2000. The importance of this issue cannot be underestimated.
Last fall when the auditor general tabled his report he said the total cost for the federal government on fixing its computers could be as high as $1 billion. I was reading an article in the paper the other day that said one contract that the federal government has given to a group of computer consultants alone could go as high as $1.4 billion, not to mention all the other hardware acquisitions, software acquisitions and all the thousands of other programmers working diligently for the federal government at this point. The cost of $1 billion has escalated dramatically.
That cost is also going to apply to industry. It will have to address the same issues as the federal government. The federal government has left it far too late. It is still in a situation of denial. It is still running around the problem and it has not come clean with how bad it is. Yet we also know industry is too complacent.
The time will come when there will not be enough programmers around and therefore what is going to happen to their business? What is going to happen to the shareholders? What is going to happen to the bankers' acceptances that are now covered off by Bill S-9?
I hope that as the government continues to help industry through Bill S-9, through the efficiencies it is allowing by the creation of this new type of investment instrument, it also recognizes that it has an obligation to tell industry that the year 2000 is serious, it cannot be delayed. If shareholders are to maintain their investments the companies have to be able to function. If the computers do not function we know that industry will not function.
Let me reiterate. We do not like the fact that this bill is coming to us via the Senate. We think that bankers' acceptances are good. But he pointed out and seemed to be quite proud of the fact that federal government debt instruments were the largest kind of debt instruments in the country. I took issue with that. We do not like it. We feel that industry has to wake up and realize that the year 2000 is just upon us and we are glad to help it as far as the bankers' acceptances and so on are concerned to improve its efficiency.