Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for Vaughan for his input, his having been the chair of the finance committee for a number of years, particularly during the period when we went through the last round of merger discussions in which it was ultimately decided that mergers would not be permitted to proceed, but that we needed to get this process right.
The member is absolutely right. This is an issue of process. If the process is right, the decision has a better chance of being right. The process has to engage all of the stakeholders. That means not just the parliamentarians and the banks. It means the people of Canada. It means those who are going to be impacted by making moves, because there is some Newtonian physics involved here. For certain actions, there will be reactions, and we have to be sensitive to that.
We know that Canadians are trying hard to understand big numbers and big business, but they often do not get all the information, so the process has to be comprehensive in the sense that it needs to be educational, engaging, open and transparent, and indeed, ultimately it needs to be accountable to the people in terms of the needs we have.
The member is quite right, though, in that this issue and the process have been done partially. I do not think that we are exactly there. I do not think there is a comfort level, either within the industry or within Parliament, or even among Canadians, that we really understand how it is going to work. It is inevitable that we will again have this more serious discussion on the issues with regard to the insurance industry, the trust companies and now with regard to banks, in that there now is a greater facility to consider certain combinations or mergers but in a better context in which there will not be unanticipated consequences.
I think there is a good opportunity here, but the member is quite right in that the process is not there in terms of the stakeholder knowledge. It is time we had that discussion.