That's a loaded question.
I think it is incumbent on government to take a leadership role, to grab the reins of the horse, as it were, and to actually take a much more active role in ensuring the private sector can play the role it needs to play, which in Canada is the role of gathering information and reporting it to FINTRAC, and then FINTRAC does its role in terms of assessing and reporting it to law enforcement.
Let me give you an example of what I think is important in terms of what FINTRAC does, in terms of whether or not we have the resources, and how the private sector can play a role. When FINTRAC was testifying before you, one of the things Gérald Cossette said that struck me as rather important was that in the last year they have determined that there were national security threats or terrorist financing incidents that occurred more than once every business day. In other words, he referred to law enforcement, or FINTRAC did, 234 reports that were in one of those two categories.
There do not appear to be sufficient resources in terms of policing to deal with one terrorist financing report a day coming out of Canada. That was just last year. Where are those 234 national security threat reports and/or terrorist financing reports? No one asked the question of what stage they're at or what's happening with that. But I think that's an issue on the federal government side where we need to be asking that question. What is the status of those reports? What is the number of reports now into 2015? What role are our federal policing agencies going to play in terms of determining that?
On the private sector side, one of the things he also said was that by working with some of the banks, they were able to determine much more quickly than they would have that there has been an increase in electronic funds transfers to the border towns of Turkey, which of course implicates ISIS. They go to collect funds that have been wired to them from Western Union, for example, and other money services businesses.
I think that type of dialogue that they were able to attain rather quickly, which I thought was crucial as a typology for money laundering and terrorist financing, which is that the border towns are funding ISIS, is really important. That information should go back to the less large reporting entities, which is the money services businesses that are most at risk and tend to be least compliant, so that they can bring into their compliance programs that type of information to make sure they engage in their role in counterterrorist financing.