Finance committee  Right.

Finance committee  No, I'm not aware of the number. It's not going to be very many.

Finance committee  Well, be careful. First off, I don't know if there are a million U.S. persons in Canada, but bear in mind, what is being reported—

Finance committee  Absolutely not. If you don't pass the IGA, you're then subject to FATCA itself. FATCA itself is enormously complex and enormously expensive, and the implications of non-compliance would be astronomical. Let me throw a couple of numbers at you. Canadian foreign direct investment

Finance committee  The intergovernmental agreement sets out what are considered to be indicators of a U.S. personage. I don't have the exact section number, but it's the usual things you would expect: U.S. address, U.S. phone number, U.S. place of birth, and standing instructions to forward funds t

Finance committee  If there's nothing to suggest that they are a U.S. person, then there's nothing more to do.

Finance committee  Good afternoon. My name is Darren Hannah. I'm the acting vice-president of policy and operations with the Canadian Bankers Association. I'm very pleased to be here today at the committee's invitation. The CBA strongly supports the government's decision to enter into the inte

Finance committee  Could I nuance that? I don't think it's quite the same. When we're talking about concerns in respect of the shadow payment system and the regulatory environment we want, we are concerned that they have sufficient standards for financial strengths. We are concerned that they hav

Finance committee  I have no idea.

Finance committee  If I may suggest, you might want to talk to the institute for advanced computing near the University of Waterloo. They are the leaders in this technology. They could probably give you a sense.

Finance committee  Do you want a great example?

Finance committee  A good example that's in the news right now is Mt.Gox. It's a small firm that started up as a thing to trade—

Finance committee  —exactly—trading cards, and it evolved into the world's biggest bitcoin exchange. People would send money to it, they would buy and sell bitcoins, and they would store them on account. It had $300-million in deposits and then it blew up last week. It's unclear whether anybody w

Finance committee  That's an interesting question. Ideally we'd like the federal government to be regulating that space. We want a certain degree of uniformity. Our concern is that right now it is fractured. If you come to a bank, you know that you have the protections of the Bank Act and everythin

Finance committee  No, through the Bank Act it would only apply to the bank. We want something broader than that. We want something that applies more broadly than just to the bank.