Mr. Chair, perhaps the member can point to some examples where a bank will offer some credit arrangements at a very low interest rate, but that is not the norm. For the average Canadian with a credit card, the interest rate is 19%. If that person has a retail credit card, we are looking at 24% to 28%.
We must keep in mind that we are looking at more than 50 million Visa cards and MasterCards. We are looking at the fact that Canadians have charged almost $50 billion to them. We have 24 million more retail credit cards from issuers as diverse as Petro-Canada to the Hudson Bay Company to Canadian Tire. That is quoting from a CBC documentary on September 20, 2004.
That documentary and other experts in the field have raised concerns that Canadians have about the system and how they feel that their lives have been made more difficult by the fact that they are trapped sometimes in paying off their credit cards over a lifetime.
I want to refer to one study completed last month which shows that almost seven in ten Canadians say that they are worried about their ability to manage their debt loads if interest rates keep rising.
The member knows that banks and financial institutions will charge what they can get away with. It is not about competition because we know that there are very few credit cards that have a 19% interest rate--