Mr. Speaker, I almost do not need to answer what my colleague has said because the words he used are very accurate. He has made the argument and the case very strongly.
However, it is an important point to restate because I cannot imagine a finance minister going around the world, as the finance minister has, taking credit for doing nothing about the banks, or actually that he and his party were opposed to the regulations that kept our banks solvent during the crisis that happened two years ago.
It is important to set the record straight in this regard, because we are thankful in this country that our banks have been secure and have weathered the recession so very well. Obviously they had some problems. There were cases where some banks had a little too much asset backed commercial paper and that was risky. It bothered me that we had banks that were holding basically paper but had not really done the job of checking out whether the loans that paper was based upon supported that value, that they paid for those.
Basically, the loans were sold between banks but the ones that were buying them were not going back and checking before they bought the stuff whether people who were being given the loans could afford to make payments. I have heard horror stories. People who might qualify in this country for a mortgage of $30,000, in the U.S. actually getting a mortgage in the range of $500,000. When we hear that kind of story it is no wonder that the system in the U.S. fell apart the way it did. However, thank goodness our banks did not have much of that and that they had regulations that made sure they had to be governed better.