Mr. Speaker, allowing that to happen reminds me of what Mr. Chrétien used to say, “If my grandmother was a bus”. We can have all sorts of hypotheticals.
I guess the NDP would like to claim credit for turning down the bank mergers, but I would like to remind the hon. member that it was not an NDP government at the time in Ottawa but it was a Liberal government under Jean Chrétien that turned down the bank mergers.
I do not mind doing a bit of a mea culpa because 10 years ago I worked for one of those wannabe merged banks. I remember the attitude at the time. We wanted to kick butt. We wanted to grow up to be like City Bank, and we have seen what happened to City Bank.
The Liberal government did the right thing. It was not an NDP government that said no to bank mergers. It was a Liberal government that retained a solid regulation and resisted the trends that we saw south of the border for increasing deregulation of the whole financial system. It was for those reasons. The member can thank a previous Liberal government for the Canadian banking system remaining sound.