Madam Speaker, I am very pleased that the member admitted that he was wrong for originally supporting the merger of the banks because I remember that time very well and there was a lot of pressure. Certainly the Conservatives who were the Reform Party in those days were out beating the drums for allowing the banks to merge, but to give the finance minister and the prime minister of the day full credit, they did resist that.
It is a bit of an irony because that is what saved the hide of the government when the economy went south in 2008. Had the mergers been allowed to happen, had we followed the same pattern as the United States, and we have no reason to believe that it would have been any other way, we would have seen the long-tail financial liabilities that at the end of the day the people in the United States have had to accept. Let us face it, the money in the banks is simply the people's money. It is the senior citizens in my constituency who put their deposits in the bank, and if the bank is totally irresponsible and buys financial instruments that result in huge losses to the banks, they simply take it out of the pockets of the citizens of the country in the first place.
It certainly was a stroke of luck for the government of the day to hold off allowing the banks to merge. Another reason that the government of the day was successful in doing what the current government cannot is that we had a very robust economy in those days. It was easier to do what the members have been talking about because the economy was good, but nevertheless a decent job was done.