Mr. Speaker, I rise tonight on an issue regarding banking procedures and charges that are levied upon businesses across the country by a company called Moneris. I originally put this question to the Minister of Finance on June 11 and I do appreciate the opportunity to expand on that question.
By way of explanation, what it really comes down to is that a company called Moneris was set up to skirt banking bylaws. The Bank of Montreal, now called BMO, and the Royal Bank, RBC, set up Moneris to skirt Canadian card rules that bar banks from issuing both MasterCard and Visa cards and processors from handling both brands.
Again, by way of explanation, Moneris Solutions Corp. which was set up in December 2001, can now process both Visa and MasterCard accounts because of the fifty-fifty partnership between the two of them. The Bank of Montreal issues cards and acquires merchants under the Visa brand while the Royal Bank of Canada does so under the MasterCard brand.
In accordance with the Canadian Bank Card Association's non-duality bylaws and according to its interpretation the banks are not combining their card portfolios. They are simply funnelling the merchant processing business to Moneris. The problem is that a couple of years ago they had over 300,000 clients, businesses with which they did business, in Canada and about 30,000 in the U.S. Obviously those are two Canadian banks for some customers in the U.S. However they are overcharging their clients.
I received a note on this from a former member of this House, in fact the former chairman of the finance committee, by the name of Murray Dorin. We sat with him in the House. He is well qualified in that capacity. He has taken these people to task on this. He is asking Moneris to review this situation and to refund the overcharged amount, which has happened routinely. We are not just talking about a few dollars; we are talking hundreds of thousands of dollars spread across many companies. That is not fair. Basically it puts small companies at the mercy of big companies.
What has happened in this case, when the Royal Bank and the Bank of Montreal hived off this business and set up Moneris, they basically set up a company that would not be as profitable under a wider range of financial services. In other words, this corporation is now extracting an excessive amount of charges from companies when their contractual agreement says that this should not happen. In other words, they are being overcharged.
We want the finance committee to take a look at this. We would like the Minister of Finance to take a serious look at these overcharges. This is wrong and we should not have to stand in the House of Commons to get action on behalf of a company that acknowledges some wrongdoing but has failed to compensate its clients for overcharging them over a period of years.
We hope we will see some action by the government and we look forward to a response by the minister.