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NDP leader Jack Layton has come up with a way to help Canadians put more money in their pockets.
The Pocketbook Protector: A Consumer's Bill of Rights outlines some of the NDP's ideas to protect consumers from price gouging, attacks on their privacy and high interest rates.
"As Canadians get their credit card bills, endless telemarketing calls or price hikes on their cable or telephone bills, they're wondering why Paul Martin isn't protecting their pocketbooks and their privacy from his corporate friends," says Layton. "The NDP believes it's time the federal government helped-by protecting consumers' rights and giving them tools that work."
The Pocketbook Protector responds to consumers' concerns over labeling, prices, privacy and pensions. Among its ideas are
- establishing citizen utility boards. This innovative idea, in place in four U.S. states, requires federally-regulated companies such as banks, phone and cable companies to fund citizen oversight boards that can challenge fee and rate increases and communicate with other consumers through the company's bills.
- protecting Canadians from credit card gouging. The gap between the prime lending rate (4.25 per cent) and the rate most credit cards charge (18.5 per cent) has never been bigger. It's time to cap credit card interest rates to five points above prime, reducing the interest paid on almost $44 billion in credit card debt in Canada.
- cracking down on instant loan and cheque-cashing companies. As chartered banks abandon poorer neighbourhoods, Money Mart-type institutions move in to capitalize on the lack of consumer choice. When exorbitant fees are included, these places routinely charge more than 60 per cent interest, a level beyond what the Criminal Code permits.
- establishing a national do-not-call list. To protect citizens' privacy, we need a national do-not-call list for corporate telemarketers, while protecting charitable organizations, and tough sanctions against telemarketers who violate the list.
- protecting pensions and investors. In the wake of the Enron and WorldCom corporate scandals, the U.S. government moved swiftly to force corporations to be truthful with their accounting through the Sarbanes-Oxley Act . Canadian investors have no such protection, despite the fact Paul Martin was finance minister at the time, and it's time Canadian corporations were required to follow the same corporate accounting rules as U.S. corporations.
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