Pat Martin

[Business of Supply, March 1st, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague from Saint Boniface for representing very ably the views of people in the west and of the people of Manitoba regarding the C-17 contract.

I am old enough to remember the scandal surrounding the CF-18, at which time Winnipeg was the low bidder on the CF-18 maintenance contract. Brian Mulroney's government gave it to Quebec for purely political reasons even though Winnipeg was the low bid.

I serve notice right now and right here that we will never tolerate an insult like that again.We threw out Brian Mulroney. We rejected his entire government based on that. It became the turning point in western Canadian politics for a generation to come. We will not tolerate the humiliation and the insult that contract represented.

Now we are faced with the C-17. Reason seems to be prevailing that Manitoba will get its fair share of the maintenance of these aircraft. If we see this reason turning or shifting for pure political reasons to give this as a gift to Quebec yet again, a bribe or blackmail or whatever it is called, we will not tolerate it. We serve notice that we will rise up in the west just as they did during the 1990s and we will denounce the government if it weakens in its resolve. We demand our fair share of those jobs as determined by the industry and we insist on that--

[Bank Act, February 27th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I am not sure Canadians know their banking rights. I am not sure that they insist on having their rights respected in the context of banking. For instance, some of the payday loan companies, those rip-off outfits that have taken the place of banks in the inner city, are charging people 2%, 3%, 4%, even 5% to cash a cheque, even a government cheque. It is against the law to charge a fee to cash a government cheque and yet they do.

Also, one of the reasons people have to go to these rip-off alternate banking companies is that they do not have an account with an established bank. Banks have to open accounts for people, even if they have no money. In the trade we made with the chartered banks, we granted them the exclusive monopoly privileges on certain very lucrative financial services in exchange for providing basic needs to Canadians. One of those things is they have to open a bank account for people. All people have to do is show some ID, even if they have no money, and then they have a relationship which enables them to cash cheques.

Does the member share my concern that perhaps we have not informed Canadians of their banking rights so that they know enough to demand their rights and that they be respected in the context of banking?

[Bank Act, February 27th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I had the interesting opportunity to attend the shareholders meetings of two of the major Canadian chartered banks, the Bank of Montreal and the Royal Bank. I was accompanied by a colleague from Quebec, Mr. Yves Michaud. Mr. Michaud is a well-known shareholder activist who is seeking to change the way banks conduct themselves, to add an element of democracy into the shareholders movement, to mobilize shareholders through a shareholders' rights movement to where we can actually effect change in corporate Canada. Seeing as corporate Canada is outside the jurisdiction of Parliament and seems to operate as an entity unto its own, we wanted to introduce some elements of democracy.

One of the motions that we moved at the shareholders meeting of the Royal Bank was to require gender parity on the board of directors of the Royal Bank. I thought this was an exciting idea. The motion was moved by Mr. Michaud and was seconded by me. There were 1,300 people at the shareholders meeting and the only motions moved at that meeting by any shareholder were those moved by Mr. Michaud and seconded by me. None of the other shareholders seemed motivated at all into shareholder rights activism that we were seeking to achieve.

The other motion that we moved would have limited the salaries of the CEOs of those banks to 20 times that of the average employee. In other words, if the average employee made $50,000 a year--and I do not think that they do in the banks; the figure is probably less than that--it would be 20 times that and in round figures it would be $1 million a year.

That year John Cleghorn made $11.2 million. We figured that was 130 times the salary of the average employee. The average CEO in Japan makes 13 times that of the average employee.

Does my colleague agree with this kind of shareholder activism? If we have failed to include things in the Bank Act to make sure that the banks are serving the needs of Canadians, whether they live in Quebec or the rest of Canada, does he agree that we need to take that activism to the streets, to the shareholders meetings? Does he agree that we need to exercise the power that we have as shareholders to make sure that we are getting good service from our banks as per their obligations under the Bank Act?

[Bank Act, February 27th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I forgot to ask my colleague's views on something that is important to me, which is the issue that we are dealing with at the privacy committee under PIPEDA. We are thinking of changing the personal information protection legislation to include the duty to notify. Thirty-four U.S. states have an absolute duty to notify individuals if their personal information has been compromised or if there has been a breach of identity.

Does the member agree that there should be a mandatory duty for the banks to notify people, even if they suffered no injury and even if the bank corrected the mistake before any material loss was suffered, so people will know how the bank is handling their personal information?

[Bank Act, February 27th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I listened to my colleague's remarks regarding the Bank Act and I share some of the frustration and concern that I heard him express. In the inner city riding that I represent, the banks abandoned, systematically over the last decade, 15 bank branches. My colleague from Winnipeg North experienced something similar. I believe she counted 13 bank branches that folded up their tents and took off from that inner city community.

The point I am trying to make is that the banks were given the exclusive monopoly on some very lucrative financial services in exchange for the duty and the obligation to provide basic financial services to all Canadians whether it is small town rural Manitoba or the inner city core areas of Surrey, Vancouver or Toronto.

They broke that compact. They tore that agreement up and threw it out the window, yet we still call them charter banks. They still enjoy the exclusive monopoly on these very lucrative financial transactions, yet they broke their end of the deal.

The point I am making is that when they fled the inner city, they left a financial services void, a vacuum that was filled very rapidly with what I call fringe bankers, the payday lenders that sprouted up like mushrooms, like a scourge on the inner city.

They offend the sensibility of every Canadian when they charge 10,000% interest on a basic loan. People think I am making that figure up. A study done by the University of Winnipeg studied fringe banking. It ranged from 1,000% at the low end to 10,000% interest. A person cannot make that kind of money selling cocaine.

It is organized crime that is behind a lot of these payday lenders. I say that with no hesitation and no fear of being sued. We know that for a fact. There is nothing else that can be done in this country to make the kind of financial return as payday lenders receive with their loan-sharking practices.

My concern and what I wanted to raise with my colleague, whom I know probably faces similar issues in the Montreal riding that he represents, is that the banks are not serving us well. We have one opportunity every five years or so to have a statutory review of the Bank Act and we fail to address some of these fundamental issues.

Why do we not force the banks to live up to their obligation to provide basic services? Why do we let them close bank branches that are still profitable, they are just not profitable enough, or they are not as profitable as their branch out in the suburbs?

Why do we let them put up ATMs that mystify and baffle people like my mother who has banked at the same street corner of Grosvenor and Stafford since 1948 until that bank branch closed? Now there is this nameless, faceless, cold ATM that she is supposed to try to figure out how to use, and then to add insult to injury, they start charging these exorbitant banking fees just to access her bank account.

Really, when we add up all these things, the banks have been raking it in making record profits. Every quarter they set new records. There are not many industries, not many sectors, that have set record profits every single quarter, year after year after year. Why can we not rein these guys in?

Why did this committee not have the guts to take the banks on and tell them they are not living up to their end of the deal with their charters, and to start doing it or we are going to tear up their charters?

[Bank Act, February 27th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, while I thank the hon. member from Surrey for her comments, I think I can glean from those comments that she shares some of my frustration, in that the population I represent does not feel well served by the banking system and, by extension, by the Bank Act that governs it.

I would like her to elaborate on one or two of the aspects of her speech. When the banks introduced ATMs, my recollection, and I have this on good authority from credible sources, is that there were no fees at all associated with ATM cards when they were first introduced. Banks were seeking to close branches, lay off tellers and save money by electronic e-commerce banking. It was to their great advantage that they weaned us from personal service from a bank teller at our local neighbourhood community bank to that machine, an impersonal cold machine that the banks do not pay wages or give pensions to.

However, I do not think that at the time the thought ever occurred to the banks that they could actually get away with charging us a fee for this privilege as well. That seemed to come later. Is it the member's recollection that there were no fees when banks first introduced these bank cards?

The other thing I would ask her to comment on is this idea of what may be a failed opportunity with the Bank Act. I crashed the shareholders meeting of two major banks a few years ago, the Royal Bank and the Bank of Montreal. I went there with some proxy shares with a member from the Bloc, a man named Yves Michaud, a great activist on banking rights.

We moved motions at that meeting. One was to make sure that the boards of directors of those banks had gender parity: 50% men and 50% women. The vote was 49.4% in favour and 50.6% opposed, which is the exact same ratio as the last Quebec referendum. Yves Michaud's vote on gender parity for the banking institutions was exactly the same, 49.4% to 50.6%, but we almost did it. They almost fell off their chairs because this one lone activist from Quebec, Monsieur Michaud, with me there to second his motions, almost toppled that shareholders meeting.

The other motion, which sadly did not succeed, was a motion to limit the salaries of the CEO to 20 times that of the average worker of the bank. Currently that is at about 150 times; it is at $7 million, $8 million, $9 million or $10 million. That motion would have limited it to $50,000 times 20.

Does the member concur that these shareholders rights activists' initiatives are necessary and worthwhile? Does she remember, in her recollection of ATM charges, that there were no bank fee charges for using an ATM in the old days? Some young turk got a promotion because he came up with this idea and said, “Hey, I bet we can charge for this and they'd still use the ATMs”. He probably built a career around that one.

[Bank Act, February 27th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, the banks are given the exclusive monopoly for a variety of very lucrative financial transactions such as credit card exchanges, cheque cashing, et cetera, in exchange for providing basic services to all Canadians. That is the nature of their charter. A lot of people do not realize that there is some reciprocity and some obligations there.

I would like my colleague's views on this. In my riding of Winnipeg Centre, the five big chartered banks have closed 15 branches in the last five years. Neighbourhood banking, as we used to know it, is gone, leaving a service vacuum that is being backfilled by ripoff payday loan artists, pawn shops and fringe banking of every variety. These payday lenders are like a scourge in my community. They are sucking the life right out of my community, in a financial analogy, because they are preying on poor people who are being denied basic financial services by the big banks.

My colleague finds fault with the comments of my colleague from Winnipeg North Centre, who is experiencing the exact same circumstances as I in Winnipeg Centre, where banks are completely abandoning their obligation and duty to provide basic financial needs. I do not understand for whose side she is advocating. I do not understand why she is being critical of my colleague, the finance critic for the NDP. We are simply pointing out that the general public needs some representation in the House of Commons when it comes to the service they get from the big banks.

I really have to wonder whose side members opposite are on sometimes. The banks have plenty of apologists. They have apologists coming out of their yin-yang from both business parties. Only one party has been trying to advocate on behalf of the end user, the consumer who is not being served well by the banking system and by the big banks. The big banks have a lot to answer for.

In the Bank Act it specifies under what circumstances banks may close branches. The tests, when we read them on the face of it, are quite high. They cannot close branches because they are not profitable. They have to view their profitability overall, and their profitability is not wanting with a $19 billion surplus. Profitability is not justification for closing a bank branch. They then have to provide alternate subsequent services to those long term clients to keep up their end of this trust relationship that they enter into with Canada.

Does my colleague agree that the Bank Act should be strengthened to curb banks from abandoning small town Canada, inner city Canada? Does she also agree that if the banks continue to disregard their obligations under their charter, we should tear those charters up? We should scrap the idea of chartered banks. Botswana did it. It kicked them out, left it open to competition and let the chips fall where they may.

[Income Tax Amendments Act, 2006, February 21st, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague spoke about tax fairness. If anything, it should be tax complicated. The bill is 542 pages, which further compounds the absurdity of our taxation system.

The government has failed to address two issues of tax fairness, on which I would like the member to comment.

One is what the government calls tax motivated expatriation, in polite terms. We call it sleazy, tax cheating loopholes in the form of offshore tax havens. This does not plug offshore tax havens. It talks about earnings offshore et cetera, but it does not talk about sheltering money offshore to avoid paying taxes altogether. We expected the Conservative government to act on that issue of tax fairness because it was certainly critical when the Liberal government failed to act on it.

The second thing is the government did raise the basic lowest tax rate from 15%, as proposed by the Liberals, to 15.5%. It may seem small, but at the low income level it is serious. The other thing it did was reduce the basic personal exemption, the amount on which no taxes are paid, which means we pay taxes on more of our income. Hardly anybody seemed to notice this.

How can those members possibly say that they lowered the lowest level of taxes when they raised it? Have they considered the impact this had on low income Canadians, when the basic personal exemption went from $9,039 to $8,639 as of July 1, 2006, a $400 lower basic personal exemption?

[Canada Transportation Act, February 21st, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I listened to the comments by my colleague, the hon. member for Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, and do not disagree with many of the remarks he made. I know that he was an active participant in the construct of this bill.

I also agree with him when he says that our rail system is stagnating. I know he is aware that we in the NDP have been aggressively trying to champion the state of our national rail system. Many of us believe that we should be making a conscious effort to get the freight off trucks and back on the rails where it belongs.

In fact, I have heard you, Mr. Speaker, make that very point in this chamber many times over the years.

My colleague from Burnaby—New Westminster put forward some amendments to this bill, which I think were seconded by my colleague from Western Arctic. I am hoping that the Bloc can see fit to support these amendments when it comes time to vote. Specifically, they are Motions Nos. 2 and 5 and Motions Nos. 3 and 11. We are optimistic that we can count on the Bloc's support.

On the issue of noise, let me simply say that my riding of Winnipeg Centre is bordered by a significant rail yard where the hostlers are constantly putting trains together. I am well aware of how residents feel about the noise in the night as the hostlers couple the trains. Sometimes prairie trains are 200 and 300 cars long. A significant amount of that goes on.

However, that inconvenience is offset by the enthusiastic support that we as Winnipeggers feel for our national rail system. We lament and in fact we terribly regret and even criticize how the rail system in Canada has been dismantled systematically by years of neglect. It has been dismantled by successive federal governments that are not in favour of a national rail system and prefer to put the freight on the road, much to the expense of the environment, jobs and everything else that goes with it.

Having said that, I hope we can count on my colleague's support for the motions that the NDP did succeed in putting forward to amend Bill C-11. Perhaps he can give us that assurance today.

[Business of Supply, February 20th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, like my colleague from Joliette, I too came from the labour movement. I used to represent members of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, a fine union that is active in Quebec as well, but I disagree with the member profoundly on his reasoning for not being able to support this particular resolution.

I am sure he knows that there was a labour compact. There was a solidarity among working people that manifested itself in the post-war era, a labour accord, so to speak. If productivity is up and profits are up, workers' wages are supposed to go up correspondingly. That was the deal.

That was the post-war accord, the labour contract we made with industry so that there would be relative labour peace and we would not have to wildcat or resort to violence in the streets to get our fair share of this great nation's prosperity. But that accord was broken. It was violated. It has been torn up. The compact has been destroyed. Therefore, this is now up to leadership in labour movements, to activist parties like the New Democratic Party and to members of the Bloc, who I assume share this objective of sharing the redistribution of wealth in a more equitable fashion, which is the job that labour unions have always had the responsibility for.

I do not understand my colleague's reasoning in that he can find an excuse to not support something that I know he personally is committed to and to let some other reason get in the way of the primary objective, which is to elevate the standards of wages and working conditions of the people we represent. When I say “we”, I mean them and us.

I do not accept his arguments. I disagree with his arguments profoundly.

Let me simply say that we live in the richest and most powerful civilization in the history of the world. I do not accept that we cannot afford to provide the basic needs of a family for it to survive. I reject that out of hand.