Finance committee  Good afternoon, and happy financial literacy month. My name is Brigitte Goulard. I am the deputy commissioner of the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada, and my colleague Richard Bilodeau is the director of our supervision and promotion branch. Thank you for the invitation. I

Finance committee  We are the regulator for the financial institutions. We are not a consumer advocate. We look after consumer interests. I think that's the distinction between Mr. Lawford and ourselves. We believe that this is going to be very good for consumers, and I'll give you just two exampl

Finance committee  Good afternoon. Thank you for your question. The financial sanctions we impose are not all the same. We use several tools to ensure that the banks do the right thing. A small percentage of banks were subject to sanctions. We sometimes conclude compliance agreements with them to

Finance committee  We never imposed the maximum penalty because we want to keep some leeway. If we impose the maximum penalty for a given violation, what will happen if the next breach is worse than the previous one? We are very happy to see that penalties are being increased, because that will giv

Finance committee  The vast majority of cases involve technology errors or inadequate disclosure. There have not been any fraud cases like the ones in the United States. In the past, it was important that we keep some room to manoeuvre, but with the proposed changes, we will have much more flexibi

Finance committee  We get more and more notices of branch closures as time goes by, and in January 2016, we issued a new guidance tool to the banks on how to hold community consultations with the public and their customers to ensure that the customers are very well aware of the branch closures. Whe

Finance committee  Yes, that's correct. In the business plan for this year that we submitted to the Department of Finance, we provided a plan to increase our staffing by 60% over the next three fiscal years. The vast majority of that staffing increase will be in our supervision and enforcement team

Finance committee  I may be able to help with that question. Each of the banks has a different way of operating. They each have different committees. What we are looking for is the right outcome: making sure that the boards of directors of the banks receive the necessary information and that we r

Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  You are very astute. You noticed that I was skating around a bit as to the number of penalties we issued. The reason is that at this time some of them may be appealed, and others are just being drafted. It is for reasons of administrative law that I did not want to provide a spec

Finance committee  I fudged a bit, but did I answer your question? I'd like to give you more information in reply to your question about external complaint processing organizations. Our role is a supervisory role. The situation is a bit different when an individual submits his problem to the bank

Finance committee  You want to know what happened...

Finance committee  I do not have that figure, but I could send it to you. It may be difficult, because in some cases people come to us without telling us that they already submitted their complaint to an external complaint processing body. Sometimes they contact us before calling on an external com

Finance committee  I have data on the number of complaints we receive every year and on the topic of those complaints, but I do not have data specifying which complaints went through the external system before being submitted to us. It will be my pleasure to provide that information to you.

Finance committee  I don't have that answer. I will get back to you on which of those 650 would come to us and which would go to the external complaint body.