Mr. Speaker, I absolutely do. We need to remind the banks of why they were set up in the first place and remind them that they used to provide that service. A bank in one's neighbourhood was a given in the past, and in fact they are pulling out now. I think we need to challenge them to move back in again. They were and could be very profitable with more services to the people of this country.
In my own community of Sault Ste. Marie, for example, a bank in the west end decided that it was going to get rid of the tellers and just have ATMs. That neighbourhood, that whole part of my community, rose up. Many hard-working families, some of them first generation immigrants to this country who had a personal relationship with their teller, said to the bank, “This is unacceptable and we are going to go someplace else”. Lo and behold, within a matter of a month or two, the tellers were back.
As a community, we can challenge the big banking institutions in that way. Of course we can also regulate the fees they charge as they find ever new and creative ways to impose them, and we can get them to stop charging those fees, because they do not need to. They are making enough money without them. They do not need to be charging men, women and families that kind of exorbitant fee to access their own money.