Mr. Speaker, I move that the third report of the Standing Committee on Finance presented on Thursday, March 27, 2003 be concurred in.
I would like to take the opportunity to debate this motion. I will not comment on the proceedings that have taken place in the last few minutes, but I have been in the House even longer than the member for Calgary Centre, and I find this to be a very interesting debate.
I will not take very long in the House today but I invite other members to respond to the motion for concurrence in the report of the finance committee regarding bank mergers, which was tabled in the House on March 27.
I also did a minority report on that, Mr. Speaker, and I would recommend it to you in terms of the wise counsel that I think I am providing to the House. On March 31 I put on the agenda before the House a motion to concur in the finance committee report.
I know today we are talking a lot about the first nations' issues and problems. This is not exactly something that is not relevant to first nations in how we organize financial institutions in our country. As I look around the country, the time has come to have a serious debate in the House on the whole question of the future of banks and bank mergers and whether they should be allowed. They are very important institutions for the future of our country.
The finance committee did a study on the public interest impact of bank mergers in Canada.
I want to go back for a minute. I remember that announcement in January 1998 that four big banks wanted to merge: the Bank of Montreal, the Royal Bank, the CIBC and the Scotiabank. I remember the chairman of the Royal Bank, Mr. Cleghorn at the time, Mr. Barrett, the chairman of the Bank of Montreal, and others thought they had a fait accompli when they announced this great merger.
There were a number of us in our party, in the trade union movement, the Council of Canadians and some other progressive people who decided we wanted to fight the merger because it was not in the interest of the Canadian public. Notably absent of course were members of the Alliance.