Mr. Speaker, I have a couple of specific questions for the Minister of Finance.
The white paper mentions the need to deal with some measures that would allow foreign banks greater access to the Canadian market. I also see a number of technical areas in the white paper that I think have been, to a large extent, incorporated in the bill.
When our government looked at the Bank Act and the financial sector during our mandate, one of the objectives was to increase competition through credit unions and through the foreign banks. For the foreign banks there were some limits because of what we used to call the bricks and mortar advantage that Canadian chartered banks have. Therefore, a lot of foreign banks were not inclined to get into the retail market in Canada but to get into the wholesale level and others.
First, does the Minister of Finance see that these measures would realistically allow more competition from foreign banks in Canada and, in so doing, give Canadian consumers greater access and more product choice?
Second, one provision in the white paper refers to data processing outside of Canada. It basically says that the proposal is to eliminate the superintendent approval for processing information or data outside of Canada. As the minister knows full well, there were some issues, I think, last year with respect to outsourcing of data processing by Canadian financial institutions that raised certain privacy concerns, particularly with respect to the Patriot Act in the United States. It seems to me that this might be moving in the wrong direction. I wonder if the minister has followed through with that in the bill and if that is the right direction to go, given some of the privacy concerns of Canadians.