Mr. Speaker, the banks are given the exclusive monopoly for a variety of very lucrative financial transactions such as credit card exchanges, cheque cashing, et cetera, in exchange for providing basic services to all Canadians. That is the nature of their charter. A lot of people do not realize that there is some reciprocity and some obligations there.
I would like my colleague's views on this. In my riding of Winnipeg Centre, the five big chartered banks have closed 15 branches in the last five years. Neighbourhood banking, as we used to know it, is gone, leaving a service vacuum that is being backfilled by ripoff payday loan artists, pawn shops and fringe banking of every variety. These payday lenders are like a scourge in my community. They are sucking the life right out of my community, in a financial analogy, because they are preying on poor people who are being denied basic financial services by the big banks.
My colleague finds fault with the comments of my colleague from Winnipeg North Centre, who is experiencing the exact same circumstances as I in Winnipeg Centre, where banks are completely abandoning their obligation and duty to provide basic financial needs. I do not understand for whose side she is advocating. I do not understand why she is being critical of my colleague, the finance critic for the NDP. We are simply pointing out that the general public needs some representation in the House of Commons when it comes to the service they get from the big banks.
I really have to wonder whose side members opposite are on sometimes. The banks have plenty of apologists. They have apologists coming out of their yin-yang from both business parties. Only one party has been trying to advocate on behalf of the end user, the consumer who is not being served well by the banking system and by the big banks. The big banks have a lot to answer for.
In the Bank Act it specifies under what circumstances banks may close branches. The tests, when we read them on the face of it, are quite high. They cannot close branches because they are not profitable. They have to view their profitability overall, and their profitability is not wanting with a $19 billion surplus. Profitability is not justification for closing a bank branch. They then have to provide alternate subsequent services to those long term clients to keep up their end of this trust relationship that they enter into with Canada.
Does my colleague agree that the Bank Act should be strengthened to curb banks from abandoning small town Canada, inner city Canada? Does she also agree that if the banks continue to disregard their obligations under their charter, we should tear those charters up? We should scrap the idea of chartered banks. Botswana did it. It kicked them out, left it open to competition and let the chips fall where they may.