Good morning and thank you. I have some brief comments and then I'll be happy to take your questions.
I'm going to start my comments where the deputy minister left off when he testified before you a couple of days ago, talking about the FATF. The FATF, as he described to you, is the policy-setting body that mandates policy that countries around the world implement in terms of their national laws to follow anti-money laundering. There are two other parts of that, one of which he discussed, which is counterterrorist financing, and the third part is sanctions law. I bring that to your attention because that's the regime we look at when we think about terrorist financing and the two pieces especially, which are sanctions law, i.e., sanctions avoidance if we're not complying with it, and terrorist financing. Those are the three pillars from which we gauge whether or not financial crimes are being committed in terms of compliance.
The FATF has done a fairly comprehensive job of policy setting for the first one, anti-money laundering policy. There are issues with respect to its ability in providing leadership, guidance, and policy on a responsive level on the other two, namely, counterterrorist financing and sanctions law. I do not know why that is the case, but the evidence is fairly strong that there are counterterrorist financing issues and sanctions compliance issues in this country and around the world. I would go so far as to say that those two regimes, those two pillars, are broken and we need to find solutions to rectify the situation. The reality is that there would not be an Islamic State today or other terrorist activities to the extent that we see growing if our counterterrorist financing laws and our sanctions laws were complied with around the world.
I'd like to make a quick note about digital terrorist financing, as I think this plays into one of the issues we are facing, which is that we have not kept pace with counterterrorism laws. Terrorist financing is not static. One of the issues with the FATF is that for whatever reason, it has not kept pace with counterterrorism. One of the issues with the digital financing regime is that entities like the Islamic State are quite versatile on social media. Not only do they fundraise on that platform, but they upload lots of their propaganda. The more they upload propaganda of horrific acts, the more they get funding around the world for their activities. It's quite a vicious circle and it's quite important that we come up to speed with what the digital financing regime is like and get a grip on that.
For example, the Islamic State uses Twitter quite a lot, but they use other platforms such as JustPaste.it and Ask.fm. Sometimes when we ask law enforcement and counterterrorism officials about those social media sites, they don't have a clue what we're talking about. I think it's important that we understand what Ask.fm is, how it works, what JustPaste.it is, and how organizations like ISIS use them to fund their terrorist activities in this country and elsewhere.
I point that issue out specifically to mention the fact that ISIS has been around for two years now in digital terrorism, and digital terrorist financing for as long, and yet in this country we don't have a digital terrorism strategy or a counter-strategy, and we certainly don't have one with respect to digital counterterrorism.
Let me talk briefly about the enforcement piece because it's an important piece of the puzzle with respect to reporting entities and law enforcement in this country.
In the past couple of years, the enforcement globally has followed the same path as the FATF. By that I mean we are quite strong on anti-money laundering law compliance and enforcement globally, but in this country much less so when it comes to counterterrorist financing and sanctions law. In this country we rarely enforce, investigate, undertake compliance reviews and prosecute for sanctions and counterterrorist financing. By contrast, in the United States they have an exceedingly strong sanctions regime and they enforce it strictly. There's no reason that we can't do the same here.
In terms of solutions, let me say that in my experience there is a great need for dialogue between the public and the private sectors. I hear all the time from both sides which I represent that there is a gap in information sharing. They each want to know what the other is doing. They each want to have more information. They are each vitally interested in combatting terrorism in whatever way they can, but they're lacking a dialogue. They're lacking the tools. They're lacking the communication.
My suggestion is that Canada take a leadership role in counterterrorist financing and sanctions, and that it contemplate putting together some sort of a centre of excellence for us to bring together all of these parties and assure that they have the dialogue that they say they need to counter terrorist financing in Canada and abroad.
Thank you.