Mr. Speaker, as I was saying before I was so procedurally interrupted, the Minister of Finance feigned surprise when the banks said they wanted to merge. It is not a coincidence as far as I am concerned and as far as many other people are concerned that they made this announcement a day after the signing of this international financial services agreement of which we are now debating the implementation.
What this will do is introduce an element of competition at a certain level in the Canadian banking industry and obviously the banks felt, wrongly, that they had to merge in order to meet the new conditions. These new conditions whether or not the banks merge still should be of concern to Canadians. What I think will happen is that these foreign banks will be allowed to compete at the high end of the banking industry. They will be able to deal with the people who have $150,000 to deposit. These foreign banks will not have anything to do with sort of ordinary folks who cannot keep $150,000 in their account.
The Canadian banks if they do not win this competition with these foreign banks and begin to lose money, where will they look for more profits in order to meet the inquisitive instincts of their shareholders? They will look to ordinary Canadians who are still captive customers of the Canadian banks. I see more and higher service charges ahead, more of all the little ways the banks have devised to take a little money off people here and there and everywhere and nickel and dime them to death.
There was a time when people actually had the feeling that banks, although it was probably an illusion, were there to serve them. When I was a kid the bank used to come to our school every Monday. This is what we would call capitalist inculcation or something like that. Nevertheless people from the bank would come to this school on Mondays and we would all have our bank books and we would put a dime in or whatever. This was to teach us to save. It was also to create sort of a lifetime brand loyalty to this bank which I will not name because I would not want to give it a free advertisement.
That was service. Teller did things for people. There are still some banks that do that, some individual bank locations. Certainly what the banks would like us to do is not have anything to do with a teller at all, not having to do with any human being. If we need something to do with a human being we are supposed to stand there and fill out all the forms while they do something else.
I went the other day to pay a Visa bill for somebody else. There is a special charge to pay somebody else's Visa bill. Pretty soon they will be measuring people's footsteps from the doorway to the teller and they will charge by the footstep or how long they are in there using up air. They will have a long line-up and then they will be charging so many bucks per cubic inches of oxygen. I do not want to get too ridiculous but the banks have in my judgement become ridiculous in the manifold ways in which they find new inventions to charge people money for things they used to do for nothing.
I want to move on to the larger issue, the WTO, and this international financial services agreement. There are two things here. There is the way the WTO works and the way the government allows itself to be worked over by the WTO, and the fact that these agreements are signed without any input from parliament.
There is no debate before the government signs these agreements. Then what we get here is an agreement that is already signed. It is a fait accompli and we do not really have any say in the matter whatsoever. I do not think that is right and it shows up the undemocratic nature of the WTO. Governments sign these agreements and then they simply expect them to be ratified.
It is part of a larger trend, particularly on the part of this government, which we see unfolding that I find objectionable not just in terms of the WTO but in terms of some of the other significant decisions it has made.
Just today, for example, people were commenting on the NATO operations in Kosovo. NATO was recently enlarged. Three countries were added to NATO. Every other NATO country had a debate in its parliament about the enlargement of NATO. Most of those other NATO countries, I think 13 out of 15, were required by their constitution or statutes that when such a significant decision would be taken there would be a real debate in parliament about the merits of that expansion, because a treaty was being changed. Certainly it was mandatory in the United States.
The only other place like Canada where it was not mandatory was Westminster, United Kingdom, but it did have a debate. Its parliamentary tradition is stronger and it would not make such a significant decision without having a debate in parliament.
What happened in Canada? We just issued a press release. The Minister of Foreign Affairs just issued a press release saying that the Government of Canada had ratified the expansion of NATO. Not a take note debate, not ministerial statement, absolutely nothing, no consideration by the standing committee on foreign affairs. Zippo.
Whether it is the WTO or NATO, we see a pattern on the part of the government that it simply signs agreements and expects parliament to ratify them or expects parliament to be silent about the ratification, depending on whether there is legislation required. When it came to the NATO expansion there was no legislation required so it did not have to go parliament a year later for implementation purposes. It never has to go to parliament. I think it is a shame.
With the WTO sooner or later it has to go to parliament, but then we are debating things a year and a half after the fact. That is inadequate also because what we find with respect to international financial services is that there is a great need for reform.
We are not having that debate about reform of the international financial services and system, although we did make progress yesterday. We made progress when the private member's motion of the hon. member for Regina—Qu'Appelle was passed in this House, not unanimously but nevertheless by a significant majority, calling for the enactment of a tax on international financial speculation, sometimes called the Tobin tax after Professor Tobin who invented it.
I sometimes think that for years we have been trying to get the Minister of Finance to agree to the Tobin tax and then finally somebody got to him and told him that the tax was not named after the Premier of Newfoundland. Then he was willing to go along with the idea. I do not know if his feelings about the future Liberal leadership were getting in the way of his relationship with the Tobin tax. Anyway, at some point the Minister of Finance decided that it might be okay to support something called the Tobin tax.
It is not inconsistent with some of things the Minister of Finance has been saying over the last little while about the need for a new global architecture for the international financial system. We need a Bretton Woods agreement for the 21st century, not an imitation in any way of the Bretton Woods system that broke down, but something that has the same principles and goals, not just the goals of creating an unfettered global free market in capital movement and speculation.
At least the world leaders after the second world war had some kind of vision of what kind of world they wanted. They were not afraid to talk about a world in which the systems they devised were there for the purposes of creating employment. They were there for the purposes of bettering the social conditions of people in all countries of the world. These sort of uncritical, brainless mantras about trade investment and liberalization as if this would be the salvation of mankind were not for them.
Mr. Speaker, it might be a good learning experience for you to go to a WTO meeting. People get up and speak about trade investment and liberalization as if it had salvific qualities; whatever problems humanity experiences, a little more liberalization of trade and investment will do the trick. It is a quasi religious experience to be at a WTO meeting. It is like being at some kind of revival meeting where a guy gets up, like Ruggiero, the head of the WTO. I am not kidding. They talk about liberalization of trade and investment as if it is the solution for everything; if there is a problem, all that is needed is a little more investment liberalization or trade liberalization.
It is not working. We are in a world in which there is a greater gap between the poor and the rich countries, and a greater gap between the poor and the rich within countries. It is creating a world which is very unjust, very unstable and very unsustainable environmentally.
Not so long ago some of us in the House rose on jubilee 2000 and the call from the leaders of many of the churches in Canada for forgiveness of debts for the poorest nations in the world. Are we doing this just because we want to be nice guys? Partly I hope.
We recognize the situation in which these countries have found themselves. Many of these countries are in these situations as a result of decisions taken by previous authoritarian dictatorship unelected governments. They are in a hole which they have a hard time getting out of. The churches have said that we need to have some debt forgiveness. We need to realize in our own time the insights of the biblical teaching about the year of jubilee in which debts are forgiven, slaves are freed, captives are liberated and people have a chance to begin anew, to start over. Many of these countries need to have that. It is not just for that. It is also in our own interests that we do this, particularly from an ecological point of view.
What do these countries do? This is part of the problem with the international financial system. They have to pay these debts in hard currency. In order to get hard currency they have to export. In order to export they have to do things that are not necessarily good for the population or good for the local environment. They have to stop doing all the things they might normally do to provide food for the local population. They grow coffee, or they have to burn down the rain forest and turn it into pasture, or they have to harvest the rain forest and turn it into exportable hardwoods or other wood products. Acres and acres of forest in southeast Asia are being turned into chopsticks as part of a growing export market.
We are not being very smart in the extent to which we make these people destroy our common environment in order to pay these debts. We are cutting off our nose to spite our face. Penny wise and pound foolish. There are an infinite number of morals which we are not paying attention to when we ask people to do this.
Imagine a world in which all the debts are paid, but we cannot breathe the air. We cannot drink the water. We cannot enjoy a stable political relationship with other countries because everything is in absolute violent chaos. But the banks will be okay. The debts will be paid. And that is the important thing because that really is our god, is it not?
What is a god after all, at least in the sense of a false god, an idol? That which has this power over human life, that is a false power, that is there only because we give it that power and we pretend that it has that power over us in some objective way rather than realising that it has that power over us because we give it that power. That is one of the commandments. Thou shalt not make a graven image. Thou shalt not have false gods before me. It means that we give power to something which has no power, except that power which we give it.
What we do here over and over again is we give power to systems over us, as if they have some kind of objectivity and reality apart from our acquiescence, apart from our own participation in giving them that power. What I am saying here today is that we need to name those idols, those false gods for what they are, as just that: something over which we should have more control as human beings instead of them controlling us. Because when we are controlled by something other than ourselves, when we are captive to something, we are captive to a particular point of view or to some power.
That is what they meant in the old days by the demonic. If you had a demon it meant you were not in control of your own life, that something else was controlling your life.
What we have here now is the elevation of the free market to the level of the demonic. We cannot control anything. We want to have a decent drug system in this country, generic drugs. We cannot do it. That would get in the way of the free market and intellectual property rights. We would like to have our own culture and protect it through split-run magazines, but we cannot do it. That would get in the way of the free market. The list goes on and on.
Soon it will be, we would like to keep our water and not export it to a country that is irresponsible in its use of water, like we ourselves are but nevertheless, we cannot do it. It will be NAFTA and free market principles that will keep us from doing that. The list goes on and on of the ways in which we have ceded the power that we should rightly hold individually and collectively, politically, over our own lives to this thing that we call the market.
That is what this bill is about and what many other bills that come before this House are about. That is why the NDP is against it.