Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague from LaSalle—Émard and my colleague from Sudbury for their excellent speeches. He is the expert to whom I generally defer on the question of consumer rights. He is now an expert in the House on this subject.
The question is timely because today we have a tendency to think that all regulation is a burden, is excessive and throws an obstacle in the path of commerce or the economy. That may be the case for certain types of regulation, and in those cases a review is in fact worthwhile. Regular reviews are appropriate, but they still have to be useful.
How could we protect the rights of consumers without regulations? By relying on the goodwill of the market? The goal of the market is not, first and foremost, to protect consumers. Its function is to generate profits for corporations, which is not necessarily a bad objective in itself, since those profits can eventually be reinvested and create jobs.
But when we talk about regulations, there are some that are useful. If there had been more regulations governing the banks, particularly in the United States, we could have largely avoided the excesses and the economic crisis that hit North America in 2007, 2008 and 2009. In fact, one of the main causes of the crisis was the massive deregulation we witnessed in the 1990s. Proper regulation can be useful for the economy. It does not need to be a millstone. We have to have intelligent regulation.