Madam Speaker, I congratulate you on your appointment to the chair. We look forward to you presiding over the Chamber with a great deal of wisdom, most of which you may have acquired in the various committees of the House. I congratulate you on behalf of myself and, I am sure, my colleagues.
I have just a few things to say about the bill. As many people have pointed out, this is a bill that was before the House before the election. It is a very large bill of 900 pages. Bills having to do with banks tend to be like that, which is probably a good reason for getting it into committee as soon as possible after everybody has his or her say with respect to the principle of the bill and what is in it and what should be in it but is not. That is what I will talk a bit about today.
First, with respect to the positive aspects of the bill, which our critic, the member for Regina—Qu'Appelle, has already highlighted on a number of occasions, one of the things we see as a positive in the bill are the changes with respect to the role of credit unions. This is something the NDP has advocated for many years. The changes with respect to credit unions are certainly seen by us as a positive development.
However, some of the other things that have the appearance of being progressive are not necessarily as progressive as we would like. I am referring to the agency the bill will create, which will be headed by a commissioner appointed by the governor in council. We would have liked a more democratic structure, with representatives from various stakeholders overseeing the FCAC to ensure that it does not become a watered down consumer agency.
This legislation includes only cosmetic measures to improve access to basic banking services. At a time when service charges are on the rise again and banks are forcing us to pay for our own laptop banking, the government has abandoned its commitment, which it made in June 1999 in its financial policy paper, to force banks to provide a low cost account.
Indeed, banks are moving to make it almost impossible to have a low cost account, even the kinds of accounts which many people have had for many years. People are receiving correspondence from their banks instructing them that many of the things that they used to be able to do as part of their basic banking service will now be a matter of the banks charging for them.
It is not enough that the bank presidents already make 30 and 40 times more than the tellers who work in their banks. It is not enough that these people make these obscene amounts of money. No, they are going to ding the poor just a little more, in the name of what, I do not know. Is it in the name of greed? Or is it that euphemism for greed we hear so often in the language of the marketplace, is it that they have to be more “competitive”?
It is the same logic which I am sure will lead, thanks to other elements of the bill, to renewed talk of mergers and to renewed talk of megabanks. Of course with the loosening up of the foreign ownership provisions, we will see not just new merged banks but new merged banks that are owned more by non-Canadians.
These are some of the objections that we have to the bill. It seems to me that at a time when we hear so much from the private sector about the deficiencies of government services, the banks themselves, as major institutions, have become so user unfriendly in terms of charging people for everything they do and for every service they provide that it is a wonder that there are not more people turning to credit unions or hiding their money under their mattress or turning to almost anything but the banks. The banks are absolutely ravenous, it seems to me, when it comes to their pursuit of profit through nickel-and-diming ordinary Canadians who are in the habit of dealing with banks.
There is one thing I would like to see in terms of financial legislation that I do not see here. Perhaps it would not be appropriate for it to be in this particular bill, but then again it might be. It has to do with bankruptcy legislation itself.
I am still dealing with people in my constituency who were done out of wages, severance pay and holiday pay when particular companies went under. Ordinary workers are the last people on the list. Everybody else gets paid off first. Many of these people find it very difficult to turn the page, because they know that a great injustice has been done to them and yet there is no legislative framework in which to pursue the justice they are due in these kinds of circumstances.
What justice is achieved is often achieved over the course of many years. I am thinking, for example, of the people who were put in a terrible situation by the privatization of CN Express and the eventual closing down of that privatized company, or of the workers in my riding who found themselves in a similar position with respect to the sale of CP Express. I am sure the list is much longer. These are just a couple of examples that I am familiar with, where people have really been done in by existing legislation or the lack of protection in existing legislation when it comes to bankruptcies.
Another thing I think we need to have more of a debate on in the House is what has happened to our whole monetary system. It seems to me that when banking legislation is before us it is an opportunity to reflect on this. I do not claim to be an expert in these matters, but there is a growing body of opinion in regard to this in the country, particularly among those who either write for or subscribe to the newsletter put out by the committee on monetary and economic reform, which I think is sent to all members of parliament.
Not so many years ago our system was changed radically when we abandoned the role by which the Bank of Canada created a certain amount of the money that was available to the Government of Canada for the financing of government programs, social programs, et cetera. There is a growing body of opinion, which seems to me to be a minority opinion, that something wrong was done when the private banks were given the exclusive right to create money and then subsequently given the right to create that money without having anything to back it up, so that the money that is created in the country today is money created by the creation of debt. It is debt created by the private banks. This is not unrelated to the situation in which governments find themselves in terms of deficits, debt and the payment of interest.
It seems to me that a debate about money reform in the country is long overdue, as is a debate about looking at ways of recreating, perhaps with some changes—because the world does change and some possibilities remove themselves and other possibilities open up—the role of the Bank of Canada as a place where money can be created and where the government can act in a way that makes it less dependent upon the creation of debt by private banks in order to create money.
These are just some of the comments that I saw an opportunity to make in the context of this particular debate. I hope that this does not lead somewhere down the line to us having to go back into the trenches, or however you want to describe it, in order to fight more and bigger bank mergers. There is every reason to believe that this legislation sets up a process and creates the opportunities for those very same kinds of bank mergers that the government stood in the way of only a few years ago, albeit after much encouragement by the opposition and, in fairness, by some of their own backbenchers.
If the government were serious about preventing these kinds of mergers and preserving competition in a Canadian context, it would not be creating a situation where, by allowing Canadian banks to merge we, in order to get competition, then have to open up our borders to American competition. I am reminded of what has happened in the airline industry: if we get enough Canadian mergers it almost seems to be an instrument by which, ironically, we could end up with more American ownership. As a result of the merger of Air Canada and Canadian Airlines what people are asking is how we are going to get more competition. They are saying that we have to open up our borders to competition from American airlines.
One can see the same thing happening with respect to banks. If we allow our economy to be dominated by one or two big Canadian megabanks the next thing we know we will be hearing the argument that we need more competition, so let us allow Chase Manhattan to open up on every corner across Canada.