Mr. Chair, essentially, this debate boils down to a choice between a superimposed bureaucracy with caps on rates, an education program that is paid for by industry or government, an entire elaborate setup of a bureaucracy to prevent people doing bad things to themselves, and 600 credit cards on the market where we have some choices.
I have a document prepared by the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada and it talks about low rate cards. The National Bank has a menu of features. First, there is no personal income required. It is not specified in order to get a card. Is that a good thing or is that a bad thing?
The credit limit is $500. Is that a good thing or is that a bad thing? The interest on purchases is 13.9%, on cash advances it is 8.9%, on balance of transfers it is 8.9%, and the number of days in which a customer has to pay it off is 21 days. The first card costs $15 and everything else is free. On that menu of features, are those good things or are those bad things?
Compare that with, for instance, the Toronto-Dominion Emerald Visa account where customers must have a minimum income of $12,000 and their credit limit is slightly higher. The card rates fluctuate between 1.9% and 6.9% over prime, so that is a pretty cheap card.
I would have thought that the hon. member would be in favour of giving consumers the choices among all of these menus of options and then letting consumers decide what is most advantageous to them, rather than getting some super-layered bureaucracy on top of it and presuming that government knows best.