Mr. Chairman, thank you very much, and thank you to all members of the committee for inviting me.
As chairman of the Senate banking, trade, and commerce committee, I have looked at this question. We have issued an interim report. The interim report was tabled shortly before the government introduced its legislation. I do not want in my comments today to pre-empt your review or prejudge what the Senate might do as a result of the deliberations in the House of Commons. The views that I'm expressing are my own, based on the findings in our report, which I think are very important. I'll touch on them very briefly and then open to the floor for any questions.
First of all, we were surprised by the scope of the problem in Canada. We were not able to put numbers around the scope of illicit funds or money laundering either for terrorists or from criminal activities, but we know the amount is in the billions. I know this from other information I received overseas at the OSCE. I'm an active member at the OSCE, the second senior officer there, and we discovered in Europe that worldwide illicit funds from criminal activities such as money laundering and illicit financing of terrorist activities are probably two of the largest growth industries in the world.
The size and the scope worldwide is larger than some countries' GDP and it's growing by leaps and bounds. The whole idea here was how we could, in a modest way, try to examine the loopholes in our regulatory oversight, which is FINTRAC, and how we might be able to plug those loopholes, but we're not naive. All of the members of our committee were not naive in understanding that these are very agile criminal minds with huge resources and talents, and it's big business--bigger, as they say, than some of the provinces of Canada. Therefore, whenever a loophole is closed, we know another loophole will be opened. We committed at the Senate that we would not only do the interim report, but we would then review very carefully the legislation when it comes from this place to us. In addition to that, we'll maintain an ongoing surveillance of it.
I want to pause by mentioning a couple of specific things. One thing we felt was important is parliamentary oversight of this activity. There are a number of questions that have been raised in Europe and elsewhere about the nature and the laws and the privacy of this oversight. We're concerned in that we don't want to have illegal activity undermine our constitutional rights of our charter. We also felt very strongly that there should be an oversight of FINTRAC itself. I haven't examined the legislation in detail. It's my understanding that the provision we made.... It's recommendation 14, because I think the real question here is not only what the law can do, but how we can maintain an oversight. We all know that parliamentary oversight is very weak. We have parliamentary officers, but essentially Parliament doesn't work very well in terms of key areas of oversight, whether it's privacy, bilingualism, and so on. Our system is there, but it doesn't operate as effectively as we would like.
We felt that one of the things we would recommend, and I would urge you to at least think about this, is whether you should establish another oversight committee. An annual review with a report to Parliament of FINTRAC's activities would be made by the Security Intelligence Review Committee, which is an oversight committee of CSIS. The reason we suggested that is because we felt that in Parliament itself we speak a good game, but we don't really do the hard work to provide ongoing oversight of activities that are under our purview on both sides. We felt that CSIS had done a very good job in terms of oversight with respect to security intelligence, and therefore we felt that was one. I'll just touch on two or three more and then leave on.
With respect to the lawyers, I'm a lawyer, a QC, a member of the bar in good standing in Ontario. Lawyers have a responsibility as officers of the court to fulfill their due responsibilities with respect to solicitor-client privilege. That's on the one hand, but by the same token, there's a national interest to make sure criminal activity doesn't carry on. What we were suggesting is that the lawyers should get at the negotiation with the government to come up with a formula that would preserve, on the one hand, the national interest of the country and, on the other hand, the solicitor-client privilege. We just said, get on with the work, and there was a delay on that.
There are a couple of other topics here that we felt were important.
I'll just conclude by saying I would propose that your staff look at the report. We circulated it. It has a number of recommendations. Some have been included; some have not. It's up to you to decide which of those recommendations commend themselves to you.
I'm ready for any questions.