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Canada's Parliament mulls 50 cent off-us fee cap

February 4, 2014

It shouldn't cost Canadians as much as $3 to get access to their own money at a cash machine, a member of Canada's Opposition party asserts. The party wants to do something about that by placing a 50 cent fee cap on off-us transactions at bank-network ATMs.

Canadian Members of Parliament in the House of Commons spent time yesterday debating the issue, a report by the CBC said. "If you start adding [fees] up over a year, that's a lot of money that consumers are spending just to access their own account and their own funds," said National Democratic Party MP Glenn Thibeault.

Liberal MP Judy Sgro singled out white-label ATMs as the worst fee offenders, citing fees as high as $6.50. However the motion before the House would not include white-label ATMs in the 50 cent fee cap, the CBC report said. Those machines fall within the jurisdiction of individual provinces.

Asked whether Conservatives would back the motion, Canada's Minister of State for Finance, Kevin Sorenson, was noncommittal, saying only that the government was committed to extending no-cost banking to Canadians.

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