Mr. Speaker, I had the interesting opportunity to attend the shareholders meetings of two of the major Canadian chartered banks, the Bank of Montreal and the Royal Bank. I was accompanied by a colleague from Quebec, Mr. Yves Michaud. Mr. Michaud is a well-known shareholder activist who is seeking to change the way banks conduct themselves, to add an element of democracy into the shareholders movement, to mobilize shareholders through a shareholders' rights movement to where we can actually effect change in corporate Canada. Seeing as corporate Canada is outside the jurisdiction of Parliament and seems to operate as an entity unto its own, we wanted to introduce some elements of democracy.
One of the motions that we moved at the shareholders meeting of the Royal Bank was to require gender parity on the board of directors of the Royal Bank. I thought this was an exciting idea. The motion was moved by Mr. Michaud and was seconded by me. There were 1,300 people at the shareholders meeting and the only motions moved at that meeting by any shareholder were those moved by Mr. Michaud and seconded by me. None of the other shareholders seemed motivated at all into shareholder rights activism that we were seeking to achieve.
The other motion that we moved would have limited the salaries of the CEOs of those banks to 20 times that of the average employee. In other words, if the average employee made $50,000 a year--and I do not think that they do in the banks; the figure is probably less than that--it would be 20 times that and in round figures it would be $1 million a year.
That year John Cleghorn made $11.2 million. We figured that was 130 times the salary of the average employee. The average CEO in Japan makes 13 times that of the average employee.
Does my colleague agree with this kind of shareholder activism? If we have failed to include things in the Bank Act to make sure that the banks are serving the needs of Canadians, whether they live in Quebec or the rest of Canada, does he agree that we need to take that activism to the streets, to the shareholders meetings? Does he agree that we need to exercise the power that we have as shareholders to make sure that we are getting good service from our banks as per their obligations under the Bank Act?