- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- NDP
- Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke
- British Columbia
- Voting Attendance: 67%
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Madam Speaker, I am not questioning the motives of the member for Simcoe North, but I worry that the impact of putting forward such a narrow bill as Bill C-289 only makes it appear like the House of Commons, particularly the Conservatives, want to crack down on money laundering, when in fact this bill would make little or no contribution to the actual fight against money laundering.
The Cullen report on money laundering in B.C., made public last June, made literally dozens of recommendations for effective measures to fight money laundering, but creating a separate criminal offence for providing false or misleading information in money laundering investigations was not one of them.
New Democrats will be opposing this bill because a serious problem like money laundering requires a much more serious and robust action than the one small and probably redundant measure suggested in Bill C-289. I will continue to question why we are here talking about this narrow and probably redundant bill instead of talking about more robust measures to fight money laundering, such as those suggested in the Cullen report.
It is also important to note that the Cullen commission report clearly states that it was the Harper government that made a very significant contribution to the explosion of money laundering in Canada when its 2012 cutbacks to the RCMP caused the closing down of the integrated proceeds of crime units, which it had been operating in each province from 1990 to 2012.
Let me quote the Cullen report directly here. It states, “The RCMP's lack of attention to money laundering has allowed the unchecked growth of money laundering since...2012.” A cynic might even wonder if this Conservative private member's bill on money laundering might have been put forward as a distraction from the role the Harper Conservative government played in allowing the explosion of money laundering through its cutbacks in 2012.
The current Liberal government does not escape criticism either. The Cullen commission reports condemns the current federal anti-money laundering legislation and enforcement in simply one word, ineffective. I will cite just one piece of evidence of how ineffective the current federal efforts are.
In 2019-20, FINTRAC received over 31 million individual reports of suspicious financial transactions, yet it transferred only 2,057 of those reports to law enforcement agencies. When we compare the efforts of other jurisdictions, we find that they have many more reports. If we compare it to the United States, we get about 12 times as many reports of suspicious transactions, but when it comes to actual prosecutions as a result of those reports, we are in the tiny percentages.
The Cullen report did note that there was some progress in British Columbia starting in 2015 when David Eby became the B.C. attorney general. The previous government had very clear warnings from law enforcement and regulators that money laundering had become a massive industry in B.C., especially at casinos. A key change was finally introduced in 2018 by Attorney General Eby. It implemented a provision requiring casino patrons to present proof that the cash used in transactions of $10,000 or more came from legitimate sources, and there was an immediate drop in the amount of transactions over $10,000 in those casinos.
While the Cullen commission report and study were really focused on British Columbia, it still made six major suggestions for improving the federal response to money laundering. I will talk for just a minute about each one of those, and they are: unexplained wealth orders; corporate beneficial ownership registry; a program to fight trade-based money laundering; better and more frequent scrutiny of money service businesses; the requirement for better reporting by chartered professional accountants; and, finally, better regulation of the mortgage industry.
All of those are not things that we normally talk about in our daily lives, so let me talk for a minute about unexplained wealth orders, which has been used very successfully in the United Kingdom. This is where either FINTRAC, or possibly the Canada Revenue Agency, would be given the power to go to court where criminal activity is suspected and require those suspected to produce information about where the money used to purchase assets has come from, was the source of funds was to purchase, for instance, real estate. If it cannot be explained and proven that it came from legal sources, then the court can order that property forfeited to the government. This is essentially what happens in British Columbia through the civil forfeiture process. That is a power we do not have. It is one I would like to see us talking about here tonight, rather than this narrow bill.
The second major recommendation is for a corporate beneficial owner registry. What does that mean in common language? We have numbered corporations, which means we cannot figure out who actually owns them and we cannot figure out their links to other corporations that take place in the darkness of those numbered corporations.
We are told now that legislation is coming. I am interested to hear the Conservatives say that they are now in favour of public access to a corporate beneficial ownership registry, but I have to say that in 2018, when New Democrats put forward this kind of idea, neither the Liberals nor the Conservatives were enthusiastic about proceeding with this. This is a recommendation that has already been made in the fisheries and oceans committee as a way of getting at another problem on the west coast in British Columbia, and that is the problem of not being able to find out who actually owns fishing licences because a great number of them are numbered corporations. I am happy that we appear to have a consensus growing here that we need such a corporate beneficial ownership registry. I would like to see the government come forward very soon with legislation to implement that proposal.
The Cullen commission also pointed out that probably one of the largest sources of money laundering goes completely unmonitored in this country, and that is what is called trade-based money laundering. If I understand it, it is pretty simple. People who make money from illegal criminal activities order and purchase goods from abroad which either do not exist or are not valued at the amount they are paying. That money goes to a company they own offshore and then comes back as clean money as a result of selling products into Canada. Nobody is monitoring this, nobody at all.
The Cullen commission said very clearly that the federal government should set up a program that would combat trade-based money laundering and the power to share information with other governments about suspicious trade transactions, which apparently are simply money laundering. That is another good thing we could be talking about tonight instead of this very narrow bill.
I will briefly name the problem with chartered professional accountants, which is that in a five-year period, only one chartered professional accountant was ever prosecuted for participating in money laundering. I would like people to raise their hands if they think that only happened once in five years in Canada. The Cullen commission pointed out that we need better reporting regulations for chartered professional accountants and we need better monitoring of their activities. It is not casting aspersions on all CPAs. It is saying that the lack of monitoring allows for those who are unscrupulous to take advantage of that and get involved in money laundering.
The fifth one of those is better and more frequent scrutiny of what are called money service businesses. That is where money is transferred back and forth abroad or back and forth around the country. There is a peculiar regulation that allows most of those businesses to avoid scrutiny from FINTRAC by changing their names and reconstituting themselves every two years. The final one is better regulation of the mortgage industry.
Let me close by repeating what I said. Money laundering is a very serious problem and we need serious measures, both in terms of legislation and enforcement, to crack down on money laundering. I do not believe that Bill C-289 is one of those measures. I do not think it makes a major contribution. However, both the Liberal and Conservative governments before and both Liberal and Conservative government policies before have prevented us from taking the actions we need to take on money laundering on a serious basis.
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Madam Speaker, I am really pleased to rise tonight to talk about money laundering, as this is a multi-billion dollar industry in Canada. We require serious legislative and enforcement measures if we are to curb its role in facilitating other types of criminal activity and prevent money laundering from contributing to higher housing prices due to its sheer volume and the frequent use of real estate as a way to launder proceeds of crime.
I have to say that over the past decade, both the current Liberal government and the Conservative government before it have failed to devote adequate resources to the fight against the increase in money laundering and its increasing sophistication. This is becoming an increasing challenge with technological change and with the emergence of cryptocurrencies, which are quite often used for obscuring the sources of funds.
I do not wish tonight to question the motives of the member for Simcoe North for putting forward this particular bill on money laundering—
Some hon. members: Oh, oh!
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Madam Speaker, I listened with care to the member's introduction of his bill, and I guess I have a fundamental question about the bill. There are lots of very robust measures that have been suggested for tackling money laundering, and it seems to me that all this bill does is take something that is an administrative penalty now and make it a criminal penalty. It seems like a very small measure given the very robust recommendations we have had from the Cullen commission about the things we need to do to combat money laundering.
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- Jun/7/22 12:08:55 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to speak to this Conservative opposition day motion because I think it identifies a very real problem facing Canadians: inflation generally, and the price of gas, the price of food and the price of housing.
Unfortunately, it does something the Conservatives are wont to do recently, which is ignore the ongoing pandemic. It asks us to ignore health experts in favour of so-called freedom from mandates. I would just remind members of the House that in my home province of British Columbia, in the last week of May, 44 people died from COVID. We have many people, some of whom I know quite well, who are suffering from long COVID, and many members, or certainly many citizens of British Columbia, are receiving things like cancer treatments that compromise their immune systems, so there are lots of reasons why we should continue to listen to the health experts and not simply adopt some political position on mandates.
I would agree with the Conservatives on only one small aspect, which is that I think the government has an obligation to show its work, as we say, when it comes to mandates. I believe that public health officials will do what is right, but the government needs to show us the evidence it is using for the decisions it is making, which it was pretty good at during the early stages of the pandemic, but seems to have forgotten about now.
Having identified the affordability crisis, of course the Conservatives like to say the solution is more money in Canadians' pockets. Strangely, there is some agreement here. I believe there are some Canadians who need more money in their pockets. The problem is this: Which Canadians need that money in their pockets? The Conservative solution is to make sure that the pockets that get filled are those of large corporations and not the people who are actually facing an affordability crisis in their families.
When it comes to gas prices, let us look at the profits of oil companies. In the first quarter of 2022 only, Imperial Oil recorded $1.17 billion in profits. This was its best record in 30 years. Suncor recorded a profit, in the first quarter only, of $2.95 billion, which is four times its profits last year. What is going on here is profiteering. These are companies that are taking advantage of the international situation, of the climate crisis and of all kinds of things to line their own pockets. The Conservative solution here, first of all, is a bit ironic, because it is to increase the deficit by decreasing our tax revenues. It is also to trust that the oil companies would not just fill that space with their own price increases and scoop up all the benefits of any tax reductions. There is no mechanism to prevent that, and we have seen the record, over and over again, of the oil companies: they will take any advantage to increase their profits. The Conservative solution risks lining the pockets of big oil and providing nothing for families who are struggling with high gas prices on a daily basis.
The New Democrats have instead called for an excess profits tax not just on oil companies, but also on big banks and large food retailers. Scotiabank recorded profits of over $10 billion last year, the Bank of Montreal had over $8 billion, Loblaws had a net profit of $1.2 billion, and Sobeys, a smaller player, had over $600 million in profits. The Conservative proposal would increase the deficit and inflationary pressures, and there would be nothing about these record profits being racked up by the big corporations. It would take away necessary revenues for providing some help to those who really are hit by the affordability crisis. We know who is hardest hit: It is the seniors living on a fixed income, people with disabilities, indigenous people and northerners.
We must never forget that these impacts are strongly gendered, I will say, in that when we look at women over 65, a vast majority of them are living in poverty, especially single women over the age of 65. When we look at single-parent families who are living in poverty, the vast majority are headed by women, so when we are talking about these impacts of affordability, we have to remember that they hit particularly hard at Canadian women, no matter their age or their family status.
I want to thank the member for Nunavut, who continually raises the food insecurity problem in the north, for bringing our attention to it again today. The biggest impact of these rising costs for Canadian families is food insecurity.
I want to draw the House's attention to the report released yesterday by Food Banks Canada. Canada, one of the richest countries in the world and one of the major food-producing countries in the world, now reports that 23% of Canadians, over seven million Canadians, reported going hungry in the past year because they could not afford to buy food. One-third of Canadians earning less than $50,000 a year reported having to skip meals because they did not have enough money, and 43% of indigenous people, to the enormous shame of this country, reported food insecurity that caused them to go hungry for more than one day.
What is the solution? Food banks do their best to fill that gap in our income system and in our food system, but we cannot keep asking charitable, hard-working volunteers to solve the food insecurity crisis. We need to step up and solve that crisis by putting more money in the pockets of those who face food insecurity, immediately and in the long term.
Conservatives point to that problem of food insecurity in their preamble, but then when we look down into the solutions in today's motion, there are none. There is nothing to actually help people who face food insecurity, unlike New Democrats' proposed measures to put money in the hands of those most vulnerable to food insecurity right now and in the long term. We have always called for an increase to OAS and GIS benefits for seniors. Seniors cannot do anything about rising food prices, because most of them already spend all of their fixed income. Their only choice is to eat less and put their health at risk. Again, we would like to see an increase to OAS and GIS.
We have called for an immediate hike to the Canada child benefit. Even a modest hike as we are calling for, of $500 a year, would provide an increase on a monthly basis to families with kids trying to meet food costs. We know there are lots of parents who go hungry and will not report it so they can feed their kids. They skip meals. They do not eat the nutritious meals they need as adults, so they can provide that food to their kids. An increase right away to the Canada child benefit would help meet that crisis, and would continue in the long run to help people with food security.
A doubling of the GST tax credit for low-income Canadians would go a long way in the short and long term to helping to meet that crisis of food insecurity.
It is interesting that the data that was released yesterday by Food Banks Canada also shows that 60% of those who use food banks report that housing costs are the main reason they are at the food bank. They cannot afford to buy healthy, nutritious food for their families because they are already paying way too much of their limited income to meet their housing needs.
This time, the Conservative motion acknowledges the affordability crisis in housing, but it proposes a national inquiry in money laundering as if this would have some impact on the provision of affordable housing units. I believe that we need to crack down on money laundering, absolutely. I do not think we need an inquiry to know what we need to do. Nevertheless, I cannot find the connection between the Conservatives saying there is a crisis in affordability and that we should have an inquiry into money laundering. It just does not make any sense to me.
New Democrats, instead, favour measures to curb the use of housing for speculative investments. We need to crack down on corporate landlords who are gobbling up affordable housing in many cities across Canada, and then renovicting the people who have lived in that affordable housing and forcing them out onto the street or into their families' overcrowded housing units.
We also need to crack down on real estate investment trusts. Real estate investment trusts get privileged tax treatment. They get tax breaks for buying up affordable housing. I just cannot imagine why we think that is good public policy in this country. I would love to see us eliminate the special tax treatment for real estate investment trusts. Obviously, we would have to phase in something like that, because people have done a lot of their financial planning based on it, but still it is something in the short and long term that we could do to address using the housing market for speculation and profit.
Instead, we should be doing something that I have always called for as a New Democrat and that we have always worked for. That is to get the government back into the business of building non-profit housing in very large numbers. The market will never provide the housing that we need at the low end. It will continue to build high-end housing until the cows come home, as they used to say where I was raised, but it will never provide those affordable housing units.
Non-profit housing could provide the housing security that is necessary for families. They do not necessarily have to own a single family house to feel secure in their housing. They could get a unit in a non-profit housing co-operative, for instance, and raise their kids in that security. It also creates a sense of community: of people who live together and have a common interest in taking care of their housing needs.
New Democrats are not the only ones who make the obvious link between the high cost of housing and homelessness, but it is something I do not hear the Conservatives talking about. It is something I rarely hear the Liberals or the Conservatives talking about. When I look in my community, I see the unfortunate complaints that are coming up about people feeling unsafe in the streets because of homeless people.
What is the solution? First of all, I do not think homeless people are the problem, in terms of safety locally. The solution is housing in the short term, so that those people are not forced onto the streets.
Of course, the member for Winnipeg Centre has been very vocal, this week and always, in calling for the government to immediately fund a low-barrier, safe shelter place for indigenous women in Winnipeg Centre, and it is a good example—
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