Mr. Speaker, while I thank the hon. member from Surrey for her comments, I think I can glean from those comments that she shares some of my frustration, in that the population I represent does not feel well served by the banking system and, by extension, by the Bank Act that governs it.
I would like her to elaborate on one or two of the aspects of her speech. When the banks introduced ATMs, my recollection, and I have this on good authority from credible sources, is that there were no fees at all associated with ATM cards when they were first introduced. Banks were seeking to close branches, lay off tellers and save money by electronic e-commerce banking. It was to their great advantage that they weaned us from personal service from a bank teller at our local neighbourhood community bank to that machine, an impersonal cold machine that the banks do not pay wages or give pensions to.
However, I do not think that at the time the thought ever occurred to the banks that they could actually get away with charging us a fee for this privilege as well. That seemed to come later. Is it the member's recollection that there were no fees when banks first introduced these bank cards?
The other thing I would ask her to comment on is this idea of what may be a failed opportunity with the Bank Act. I crashed the shareholders meeting of two major banks a few years ago, the Royal Bank and the Bank of Montreal. I went there with some proxy shares with a member from the Bloc, a man named Yves Michaud, a great activist on banking rights.
We moved motions at that meeting. One was to make sure that the boards of directors of those banks had gender parity: 50% men and 50% women. The vote was 49.4% in favour and 50.6% opposed, which is the exact same ratio as the last Quebec referendum. Yves Michaud's vote on gender parity for the banking institutions was exactly the same, 49.4% to 50.6%, but we almost did it. They almost fell off their chairs because this one lone activist from Quebec, Monsieur Michaud, with me there to second his motions, almost toppled that shareholders meeting.
The other motion, which sadly did not succeed, was a motion to limit the salaries of the CEO to 20 times that of the average worker of the bank. Currently that is at about 150 times; it is at $7 million, $8 million, $9 million or $10 million. That motion would have limited it to $50,000 times 20.
Does the member concur that these shareholders rights activists' initiatives are necessary and worthwhile? Does she remember, in her recollection of ATM charges, that there were no bank fee charges for using an ATM in the old days? Some young turk got a promotion because he came up with this idea and said, “Hey, I bet we can charge for this and they'd still use the ATMs”. He probably built a career around that one.