Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise here today on Bill S-5 and the amendments that the NDP has put forward with regard to creating more transparency and accountability in this bill.
We do support the bill. However, we see this as a missed opportunity because there are so many issues relating to the banking industry right now that affect Canadian consumers, and also Canadian companies. I was at committee today and so I do not know if this has been discussed a great deal here, but small and medium size businesses have been hurt exponentially by the banking system in recent years. I will get into more detail on that later, but it is important to put that as part of the equation as we talk about this missed opportunity here.
First, as my colleague from the Liberal Party noted, the bill comes from the Senate. That is a concern for us. Why would the government table a bill in the Senate and then have it come to the House of Commons? A Conservative called the Senate equally capable. That is an interesting description for the Senate coming from the Alliance/Reform Party base out there when senators are unelected, unaccountable individuals.
While there are some very good people in the Senate who do some good work, at the same time they are not elected and not accountable to the Canadian people. Therefore, I do not think the Senate is equal to the House in any sense whatsoever. I am shocked that a Conservative/Reform/Alliance person would call the Senate that, because senators are political patronage appointments made by the Prime Minister, whether that be Joe Clark at the time, Pierre Trudeau, Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin or now our current Prime Minister.
Senators do not have to go to the electorate and earn their seat. Once again, there are some very good people there whom I have worked with on a lot of good issues and I respect them a great deal, but there is a big difference between them and having to go to the person checking out groceries and selling cars. They are our bosses. They are the ones who decide whether we get to this place or not.
Having said that, I am a little concerned that the bill is from the Senate. I say this because in the past I worked on Bill C-393, a bill on providing generic drugs to developing countries for tuberculosis, AIDS and malaria. The House of Commons passed it, but it actually died in the Senate. Thus the elected body here passed a bill, sent it to the Senate, but it never made it through, even though it should be Canadian law right now so that we could provide medicines to those who are suffering from tuberculosis, malaria and AIDS in developing countries. There was also the bill from Jack Layton, the climate change bill, that was passed in this House of Commons, but, again, did not make it out the door of the Senate.
Now we have the reverse coming back here and what we see is a very scoped bill on the banking industry. However, I am glad that the Conservatives are dealing with this. The government is actually addressing some component of it, but let us take a step back in history, which I think is very important.
It is interesting that representatives of the banking industry came into my office a year ago and said that I should be thanking them for the work they had done and the fact they had propped up the Canadian financial system because of the way banks were structured and had done business. At that point, I asked if they wanted me to go to my computer or to my filing system and pull out all of the presentation decks and summaries they had previously provided me saying that they had to become like the American banks.
It was the New Democrat members in the House of Commons who fought against that. I will admit there were some Liberals who did so too, because I have been corrected in the past on this, and quite sincerely, by some of my Liberal friends. However, it was John Manley under Paul Martin who was trying to move our banks towards the American model. We voted against that and stopped it and it did not pass the House of Common, as there were some others who supported that notion to keep our banks the way they were. However, it was certainly the Conservatives, the right wing members, who got up day after day to complain about how Canadian banks would be swallowed up by U.S. institutions if we did not act at that particular time. That took on—