Finance committee  I will double check this. If the commissioner proposes, does the minister have to approve?

Finance committee  Yes. If and when the legislation passes, there's a process to determine, in the context of or in comparison with other Governor in Council appointees, what the appropriate salary would be. This depends in large measure on the responsibilities that go with it.

Finance committee  So yes, the commissioner proposes an assessment level, as is the case with the existing assessment, and the minister must approve.

Finance committee  Thank you. I'd be glad to. As we've been discussing, the government's decision was to create a financial literacy leader position and to create it within the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada. The duties of the financial literacy leader are spelled out in the legislation. It's

Finance committee  The legislation provides the possibility—but not the necessity—for the commissioner to place an assessment on financial institutions in support of the financial literacy activities. Just as is the case with the other assessment or the existing assessment power, the commissioner i

Finance committee  I don't think I can improve on that, Mr. Chairman.

Finance committee  That's it exactly, Mr. Chairman. You're doing too good a job for me to really say very much. That's the only problem. I can say that although the recommendations of the task force are very good and the government is seeking to move ahead on them, very few of them require legisla

Finance committee  Indeed.

Finance committee  I suppose Commissioner Menke could designate any one of her employees as financial literacy leader if she wanted to give them the job title. The government's decision in this regard was that the financial literacy leader needed to have a sufficiently high profile and that there n

Finance committee  FCAC, as the commissioner stated, is very active in the financial literacy area. That said, the role of the leader is to encourage a high profile, to work with other stakeholders in a very high-profile way. I thinks that's one of the reasons the task force recommended a separate

Finance committee  Money has been set aside in the budget, and there is already sufficient legislative authority for the government to make payments to the FCAC in support of financial literacy activities.

Finance committee  Yes, very much so. The mandate of the financial literacy leader, and I should note that the legislation also makes clear that the mandate of the agency as a whole, is also to support financial literacy. There's no restriction really placed on this, so it provides a broad flexibil

Finance committee  Well, the overall mandate, of course, is to work to support financial literacy, but what exactly that involves is not specified in a way that would restrict the leader or the agency from tackling emerging problems, things that we have yet to anticipate.

Finance committee  Thank you. In terms of the current activities of banks, as Minister Menzies said, banks already do what the minister noted is a surprising amount of financial literacy initiatives. Some are done collectively through the Canadian Bankers Association. The Bankers Association works

Finance committee  Thank you. I can just expand briefly on what Minister Menzies said. The government's approach in this regard, which is very much its approach in the financial sector overall, is to avoid regulating prices or rates and to encourage competition, clear disclosure, and now the third