I have outlined five recommendations, and I'm not going chronologically based on my opening statement but rather am speaking offhand. One is the fact that FINTRAC has always been blamed for not sharing enough information with the law enforcement, but the way things are played in the FIU business, unless FINTRAC gets the counterterrorism intelligence blended information from law enforcement, it's not able to inform and educate the financial community or the financial institutions as to what to look for in a suspicious activity report.
What is suspicious activity? There has to be a dovetailing of the law enforcement counterterrorism information with the financial intelligence that's gathered by FINTRAC from financial institutions in order to remove the problem of defensive filing of suspicious activity reports, overregulation, or not exact.... Because the financial institutions badly need guidance from the government. That is one recommendation I'd like to make.
Then there's always this fact of Canada being an active member of the UN and funding a lot of UN programs and making requests to the UN al Qaeda monitoring team as well as the counterterrorism executive directorate for impact assessments and implementation effectiveness assessments. Where are the taxpayers' funds going? There has to be some accounting for that. There hasn't been any study of either impact or implementation effectiveness.
Those are two key recommendations I'd like to make. Also, I did look at whether in Bill C-51 the scope of material support could be brought in to include.... The U.S., for example, has a pretty huge and expansive scope regarding what material support is. It includes anything that has value to a terrorist organization, be it messages or money or materiel or men, or that could be of use to a terrorist organization. I would recommend having a more expansive and broader scope of material support.
Then I'd say you should work with social media companies to take down videos, like the YouTube videos, which really give a lot of information to the terrorists to do this or that. There has to be some provision. I'm glad Bill C-51 has started mentioning taking down videos, of course while balancing privacy concerns and free speech.
Basically those are the main recommendations I'd like to make. There is also the fact that when you look at foreign terrorist fighters, given Mehdi Nemmouche and other attacks, even in Ottawa, it's difficult to really pinpoint Iraq and Syria as the two regions. The ISIS phenomenon is global and worldwide. So men, materiel, messages and money could be coming from any country, transiting through any country and perpetrating acts in some third or fourth or fifth country.
I thank you for that.