Mr. Speaker, we cannot talk about this bill without a clear understanding of what happened in the beginning. In budget 2009, the Minister of Finance created a national task force that was mandated to provide the minister with advice on the issue of financial literacy. So the group went to work. It was made up of various stakeholders from different sectors, including workers, volunteers and teachers, as well as people from the business and financial sectors.

The task force submitted a report containing 30 recommendations. One recommendation was to create the position of financial literacy leader. This bill completely disregards all the other recommendations. To me, that does not make any sense. The report gave 30 recommendations and the government adopted only one of them.

Furthermore, this bill could have described very concrete measures. For instance, one of the recommendations was this:

The task force recommends that the Government of Canada, as part of the 2011–12 renewal of its urban aboriginal strategy...make financial literacy training programs for young aboriginal Canadians eligible for funding.

This could have been a concrete recommendation in terms of financial literacy and it could have helped. We all know that aboriginal youth and aboriginal communities have problems stemming from poverty.

Often, one of the problems, when we talk about financial literacy, is that they do not understand the terms accurately. If someone needs to buy a car and does not understand the actual terms of their loan, they go into debt and go bankrupt. If they use a credit card to buy food, but they do not have a good grasp on financial literacy, they have the impression they are paying 10% interest when really it is 28%, because sometimes the advertising is hard to understand. I think help is not being given.

So this is a community that could have been targeted for this. The task force also recommended that the government of Canada provide recent immigrants with financial information and education services tailored to their needs, as part of the orientation services offered both abroad and in Canada by the Immigrant Settlement and Adaptation Program and the language instruction for newcomers to Canada. So this is another group that could have been targeted, but that has absolutely ignored. Those recommendations are not taken into account in the bill.

Some of these immigrants are coming from countries like Africa where, and I apologize for the expression, about 1% of the population has a credit card and a debit card and where bartering is still done with food and that sort of thing. They also use cash, but they still use the barter system. They find themselves in Canada, with a system that involves handling a mountain of paperwork and where they may not understand the language very well. They may not have a significant level of education, and they find themselves in this kind of system and having to manage to understand. They have to understand an income tax system, which is entirely new to them.

The government is choosing to target only the financial literacy leader, instead of applying a recommendation like that one, which could have been more concrete. I do not understand the priorities; it is impossible to understand. When they have 30 excellent recommendations and they choose not to pay attention to them, that seems to me to be rather unusual.

The possibility was also recommended of working side-by-side with provincial and territorial governments in order to provide teachers with the tools they need to teach financial literacy to children and to their students. If financial literacy is taught gradually and in a language that is familiar to children, teenagers, college and university students, there is a chance that they will understand it. That could, therefore, be the way forward. It could facilitate a beneficial exchange between provinces, so that teachers are able to teach the material and have the tools they need at their disposal, instead of having to invent them. That was another recommendation.

It was also recommended that employers be able to offer financial literacy training, so that their employees fully understand, for example, their pension programs and the importance of investing in an RRSP. But this recommendation has not been followed. That strikes me as incomprehensible. In my opinion, budgets and key recommendations should have been the focus of this bill.

Granted, the bill creates the position of financial literacy leader, but it is just as essential ti implement the key recommendations, and it is crucial, as of now, to take into account these recommendations, and that things do not drag on. Otherwise, the work of the task force will largely fall short of its objective.

In my opinion, this smacks of a lack of logic and a failure to adequately prioritize. Positions should not be created without prior knowledge of the objectives, without knowing how to proceed, and what the priorities are for implementation. There needs to be some direction when that kind of position is created, otherwise it is tantamount to sending a cheque to a senior official who is acting rudderlessly.

Christine Moore