Madam Speaker, I have a quick anecdote.
I was actually sitting on a credit union board in that period of time when we were looking at enhancing the security of both debit cards and credit cards. The member is dead on with his comments about the large banks simply seeing this as an expense of doing business.
What that meant to them was that they passed on that expense to the consumer. It is part of the reason we have somewhat higher interest rates, both on our credit cards and consumer loans.
It would have been a time for the government, not so much under the Criminal Code but under the industry department, under commercial activity in this country, for that responsibility to have been imposed because it was not done voluntarily by our financial institutions. They did not end up bearing the costs. We, as consumers, ended up bearing the costs.
We could have done that quite a number of years ago. The technology was there. I was sitting on those boards more than 10 years ago and the technology was already there at that point. We are just starting to see it at this stage.
There has been a misdeed here on the part of both the banking institutions in this country and the government.