In New Westminster too, my colleague from New Westminster--Coquitlam tells us.
I do not know if Bill C-37 satisfactorily addresses the one compelling issue facing Canadians and that is access to banking services. This has led to the proliferation of payday lenders. Every single vacancy in every strip mall across the country is being filled with another Money Mart or Payday Loans, et cetera. Why? Because they can charge 1,000% to 10,000% interest per year. Show me another business enterprise that receives 1,000% interest. Selling coke for God's sake does not provide 1,000% interest. Prostitution or any other illegal activity does not provide 1,000% interest.
The province of Manitoba did a study on payday lenders in my riding of Winnipeg Centre. One case study documented 10,000% per annum interest on some of the loans as a result of a series of surcharges and fees and roll-over loans. No wonder the Hells Angels are involved. No wonder terrorists are looking to this kind of activity to launder money. I trace it back directly to the banks and the abrogation of their duties to provide basic financial services. By abrogating their duties, they left a vacuum for these rip-off outfits to spring up.
Without getting too over the top on what these reprehensible companies are doing in my riding, one thing they are doing is charging to cash cheques. If people knew their banking rights and if the charter banks were living up to their obligations, people should know that the banks have to open a bank account for them. If people have one piece of ID, even if they do not have any money, a bank has to open a bank account for them. It is in the Bank Act.
Yet poor, low income people do not know this, so they get maybe a government cheque and have no place to cash it because they do not have a relationship with a bank because the bank has abandoned their community. They wind up at a payday loan outfit where they are charged 3% or 4% of their social allowance cheque to cash it. It is illegal to charge to cash a government cheque. Another thing people do not know about their banking rights, and the present and past governments have made no effort to tell them.
Governments have allowed this burgeoning mini-industry of preying on the misery of poor people by taking a chunk of their meagre paycheques to provide basic financial services. I am not overstating it to say that it is morally and ethically reprehensible to be in the payday loan industry. It is morally negligent for the government not to police this industry and not to prosecute anybody who would exceed the usury laws in the Canadian Criminal Code and charge 1,000% per annum. They should be locked up. They should be led away in handcuffs. They should be dragged away in a paddy wagon and locked up, and the key thrown away because there is no lower form of animal in my view than someone who would prey on human misery by exploiting the poor and the desperate in the inner cities.
I am no big fan of the big banks. We do not need to do a tag day for the big charter banks in this country, but we should be holding their feet to the fire and make them live up to their basic commitments, their basic obligations under the Bank Act.
Bill C-37 would have been an opportunity to remind the charter banks of their obligations. In the inner city of Winnipeg where I live and at the corner of Portage and Arlington where I had my campaign offices two elections in a row in two different vacant buildings there are six payday lenders on that one intersection within a half a block in any direction and they are open all the time.
For low income people in my riding, because these firms have been around for almost a decade, people carry their Money Mart card in their back pocket as if that is their ID. That is a poor man's credit card today which is a licence to cheat that person. It is not a credit card. It is not even an ATM card where people can get money using it. It is their identification because payday lenders are smart. They have nice clean tile floors, they are well lit and illuminated. People are treated with some dignity because they want to cheat them. People are sucked in that way, but that used to be the type of service that banks offered legally to neighbourhoods and communities. They were big clean places too where people could go with their paycheques and be treated with some dignity. All that is gone.
We have to remind our charter banks that there was a reason why we gave them the exclusive monopoly on certain very lucrative financial transactions and that was so that they would provide basic services whether we were in Plum Coulee, Manitoba or New Westminster, British Columbia, or in the heart of downtown Toronto, or wherever they are needed.