Mr. Speaker, I would refer the member to The Globe and Mail article of a couple of days ago which had the full chart of ATM fees. He will note that I said up to $5 or $6, which is the maximum fee for accessing one's own money through a private ATM. The fee ranges from about $1 for accessing an ATM at one's own bank to a higher rate for accessing a competitor's ATM and then to a maximum of $6.15 if one were to access a private label ATM. The member can check the facts. I certainly will not apologize for giving the actual facts to the House.
With respect to the question of closures, I am glad to hear that the member had this experience with a bank and that he is happy with the fact that the bank proceeded to close. Some of us come from areas that have seen all bank branches close. In my area of Winnipeg North we lost 10 bank branches in the space of the last six or seven years and the community fought each one of them. The community went to the bank in each case. We rallied and worked together. We protested, we met, we called and we signed petitions. We did everything possible to convince those banks to stay or to at least prove that they were not profitable. We could not get the financial statements nor could get the information to know the actual situation. We could not force one bank to stay.
When the last bank closed a few years back, which was CIBC, we managed to convince it to give a bit of money to study an alternative financial services centre and managed to get the bank to sell its building to the community for $1.
The community rallied. My community felt that they had been loyal to their banks for many years and if the banks could not in turn be loyal to them, they would do it on their own. In November of last year, the Alternative Community Financial Services Centre was opened in my constituency of Winnipeg North as a result of the community coming together, working with the credit union movement, the Assiniboine Credit Union, SEED Winnipeg, the United Way and a number of organizations that realized the importance of every community having some sort of banking presence. This was a very successful victory.
We are now working hard on trying to bring regulations over payday lenders because that is what we have been left with.
What we are trying to say in this review of the Bank Act is that with $19 billion in profits, there is no way in heaven's name that banks should be closing bank branches arbitrarily and paying their CEOs that kind of money without some accountability to the community. If the member does not understand why we are here, what our role is as an MP and what Parliament does, it is to ensure that Canadians have some access to justice and fairness.