Before I talk about that, I would like to make a small clarification.
For a while, we have been talking about terrorist financing and terrorism in the singular. However, there are extreme differences among the groups labelled as terrorist. We focus a lot on the Islamic State. But, for a number of years, the European Union’s terrorist list has run the gamut from three-person Italian anarchist groups to Hamas and FARC. This is just to say that the notion of terrorism applies to a number of different groups and is not synonymous with the Islamic State. That point is a real issue.
In regard to effectiveness, Canada does indeed have a system in place. It is quite unique compared to other states in that, for a dozen or so economic sectors, it is based on a requirement to make a declaration based on suspicion and a certain threshold. In other words, any transaction of more than $10,000 has to be sent to FINTRAC, the cell where financial intelligence is kept. In Canada, all our eggs are in that basket.
Let me put that into perspective. In Europe, most declarations each year, almost 200,000 of them, are received in the British cell, the one in the United Kingdom. The figure may be lower now. In Canada, we receive two million each year. The main issue is the opposite. Financial information goes to the financial intelligence cell. The main issue is how that mass of information is processed. That also raises questions, especially from the privacy commissioner, about the use of personal information collected because of that $10,000 threshold, or whatever it is, not because of specific suspected cases.
That is the issue. To an extent, the information is going around, cooperation really is being established with its points of tension and its ambiguities. However, the issue remains to analyze the information and produce financial information. That is really what it revolves around here in Canada.