Mr. Chair, first, the hon. member keeps repeating this business about 60%. I would be interested if he could name for me one credit card that charges 60%. I have gone through the material of the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada on its website and I cannot find anybody who has been charged remotely close to that. I do not know what he is talking about, to be perfectly honest. If he could name one, I would be interested to know, as would probably everyone watching this.
The second thing has to do with the delinquency rate. The delinquency rate is just a touch over 2%. It seems to me we could look at this half full, half empty, but this is 98% full and 2% empty. To be perfectly honest, 98% of Canadians seem to be managing quite nicely their credit as it relates to credit cards. I do not see what the issue is.
Third, the proposal is really even more bureaucracy. I agree with him on the point of more education. However, I cannot quite fathom how anybody who gets a $1,500 bill on a VISA card and makes a $70 payment for that month would not understand that there is still $1,400-odd that has to be paid back. If people do not understand that, probably they should withdraw entirely from the financial system.
While I agree with him on one point that we can always have more education, and that is what the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada is designed to do, he seems to want to either layer on bureaucracy in the form of the federal government, for which all taxpayers then have to pay, or layer on bureaucracy on the credit granting institutions for which in one way or another all credit users will have to pay.
When there is a delinquency rate of somewhere around 2% and 98% are managing quite nicely, why would we create a whole big bureaucracy, be it government or be it a private sector bureaucracy?