Finance committee  Yes, exactly.

Finance committee  I would say the core thing.... I think Mr. Van Kesteren pointed out the good old-fashioned conservative Scottish banking. My last name is Campbell, so I took heart at that. I would say that fundamentally it's the behaviour of our banks, it's the behaviour of our regulators in terms of the quality of supervision, and it's the content of the rules.

Finance committee  On the question of bank fees, if you go to the FCAC's website, you'll get a tremendous resource tool. There's basically a range of accounts for all types of people. You have low-fee accounts and you have no-fee accounts for youth and seniors and so on. There's a range of accounts people can pick and choose from.

Finance committee  This was a government initiative. This did not originate with the industry. As we looked at it, though, it struck us that the rationale was fairly clear. In the ownership structure of Canadian banks, you have three tiers. You have the very, very large banks that have to be widely held, you have the middle tier of banks that can be more closely held, and then you have smaller banks.

Finance committee  I hope so. Governor Carney is in very good company. It isn't just Governor Carney, of course. It's the minister, Mr. Flaherty. It's Superintendent Dickson. Their counterparts around the world—in the United Kingdom it's the Chancellor of the Exchequer, it's Commissioner Barnier in Europe, and authorities in Japan—have all said the same thing.

Finance committee  There are two things I will say in response to that. The emphasis of your point is absolutely right in the sense that none of us—and that's certainly not the case with Canadian banks—can be complacent about the levels of Canadian debt. We agree. We monitor this very carefully.

Finance committee  Oh, yes.

Finance committee  I'll be very quick and say yes, we were consulted; yes, we had a very full opportunity to make our thoughts known; yes, we put our commentary in writing; and where we had questions or follow-up, we pursued those questions with the Department of Finance. We feel we've had a good opportunity for input.

Finance committee  Thank you very much. First of all, I would say there's an old Spanish proverb that says that the biggest enemy of the bullfighter is not the bull, it's the applause. That's related to your comment earlier. We all know that there was a decision of the Supreme Court in December.

Finance committee  Very briefly, I think the situation in the United States and the situation in Canada are dramatically different. We have dramatically different mortgage markets. We have a dramatically different approach to lending. You know, the approach of Canada's banks is they lend money to people who will pay it back.

Finance committee  Thank you very much.

Finance committee  Well, it's important that the first thing to bear in mind here is that there has been basically a change of providers rather than a pulling out; there has been no pulling out of a consumer redress system. In fact, for consumers, all banks in Canada are dedicated and committed to providing a very robust consumer redress system, both internally and externally.

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. We are pleased to provide the banking industry's comments on the Financial System Review Act. We believe strongly in the importance of insuring that the legislative and regulatory framework is reviewed regularly, and for that reason, we were pleased to see that the bill proposed retaining the sunset clause for financial services legislation at five years.

Industry committee  That's really the right question. Financial literacy and digital literacy go across the whole spectrum here, and they're absolutely critical. We're very active. We think what Minister Flaherty is doing on financial literacy is great. We are strongly supportive of that. But that's only part of it.

Industry committee  I appreciate that.