Thank you very much, Chair, and thank you, Mr. McGuinty, for coming to us tonight. I appreciate your work on NSICOP.
I'd like to talk a little bit about foreign influence in Canada with respect to criminal activity, particularly things like money laundering as it affects the activities in Canada of criminalized gangs, some of them with foreign influence connections. The estimates that you quote in your report indicate that there's an upper estimate of $100 billion of investment in Canada through money laundering. I would call it “investment” using the term loosely. It's most prominent in real estate and casinos.
These are the most publicly discussed domestic examples, but it's also been looked at by CSIS and the RCMP, and referenced of course in your 2018 and 2019 reports regarding a project called “Sidewinder” that was referenced in the paper that was produced by Anne-Marie Brady, who has appeared before us. She relied on the 1997 draft report between CSIS and the RCMP with the code name “Project Sidewinder”, which aimed to gather and analyze intelligence about efforts by the Chinese government and Asian criminal gangs to influence Canadian business and politics. That's a very serious subject, of course.
This leaked report, a 1997 draft, was in fact discredited by SIRC itself in 1999 and 2000, which said it didn't really meet the standards of professional and analytic rigour. They also noted that they revised the report, and a finalized version was issued in January 1999. For some reason, NSICOP in 2018 or 2019 doesn't refer to the finalized Sidewinder reports. Is that report available to NSICOP for its review? Was it aware of it? Did it ask for it?