Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Meunier, Mr. White, I first want to congratulate you, something we rarely do here. Your presentations were extremely clear and I sincerely thank you for that.
I want to ask you a few questions so we can find out, somewhat as Ms. Glover did, what we can do to help.
I attended a conference in London a few months ago where they gave us a statistics that astounded me. They told us that every four days, the equivalent of the GDP of the entire world is transferred on this planet. That is astounding. It means that the filters we have to put in place to try to find out what is being done properly and what is being done crookedly have to be as elaborate as what is in place.
We must not fall into what Mr. Rudderham described: it must not turn around in a nanosecond and end up in a black box in the Cayman Islands. We have to be as cunning as the people who are doing that. So that is kind of what I want to look at which you today.
One thing sometimes surprises us when we examine the cases offered as examples. I am always very careful, as well, not to drag you into our purely partisan world. I am going to try to adhere to that today.
I'm going to talk to you about a concrete case, one that has already been tried and is over: the Earl Jones case. I have the entire file, all the court documents and all the internal documents from the Beaconsfield branch of the Royal Bank of Canada, where Earl Jones did business and where he stole $50 million from his clients in an absolutely classic Ponzi scheme.
In the documents from the bank, it says at every stage:
They told him he was using an interest account for reasons that were not related to the normal establishment of such an account. It was clearly illegal and he could get into trouble.
That went on that way for years and years, in the Earl Jones case.
There is a disagreement between the Conservatives and us. They say the best thing to do is to create a national securities regulator, and I never cease to repeat that the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions did nothing in the case of Earl Jones.
Does a case like Earl Jones's affect you directly or indirectly, the people at FINTRAC, or does it fall strictly within the responsibility of the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions of Canada?