Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to continue the presentation I started yesterday. To quickly review, Bill C-57 is about the governance laws of banks, insurance companies, their holding companies, and credit unions. It is to provide a framework that they are going to be obligated to operate within. It also brings this in line with the Senate bill, Bill S-11, which was a standards update that occurred in 2001.
I am sure that Bill C-57 is going to give a lot of comfort to Canadians who invest and who have savings and business with financial institutions. I think this is a good bill. My party agrees with it, of course, because while the Liberals failed to mention this in their presentation, it is here because of the insistence of members of our finance group, the member for Medicine Hat, the member for Edmonton—Spruce Grove, the member for Peace River and the member for Portage—Lisgar and, of course, also the insistence of the chief member of the finance committee from the Bloc. They have insisted that the government not delay the introduction of this legislation to provide this framework and to update the governance regulations, basically so these institutions will have a clear understanding of where and how they are supposed to operate within these guidelines. I know that does give a level of comfort to Canadians.
As part of my presentation on the bill, I want to now move to what Paul Harvey might refer to as “the rest of the story”. Canadians who are watching the progression of this bill through House and who have read about it are no doubt, as I mentioned earlier, getting a great deal of comfort from knowing that the trust they have in their financial institutions is going to be even more secure and they are not going to be troubled by having another Enron or a WorldCom here in Canada. That is a good thing for Canadians, and I think all parliamentarians should take credit for getting the bill into the House.
The rest of the story is this. Let us imagine the average Canadian watching the progress of this piece of legislation about how these financial institutions are going to be governed and how they are doing their business. Let us imagine the questions they must have in their minds about how this Liberal government, which has shamelessly, over the last 12 years that I have been in the House and probably longer than that, been followed by scandal after scandal, by corruption after corruption, plagued by evidence and accusations and acts of patronage that are just beyond the comprehension of—