I would be happy to.
The concept of politically exposed persons was developed by the Financial Action Task Force, the FATF, and it speaks to a specific risk of money laundering and terrorist financing, particularly in the space of corruption. This is an aspect that plays to both the international integration of standards and laws, as well as to domestic objectives of making sure that corruption in particular is kept in check.
I would start with the observation that, happily, Canada is a country that has some of the fewest incidents of corruption in the world. We rank as ninth in a standard of some 170 countries when it comes to not having corruption as an issue. However, identifying people as politically exposed persons, which in Canada goes from the Governor General to mayors right now or to the heads of international organizations, speaks to the financial institutions' reporting entities having the right information in the transactions they survey to be able to pick up patterns that relate to corruption in particular.
The standards are there essentially to have an information base that can allow the identification of the particular stream of transactions that are problematic. This is more so in other parts of the world than in Canada, but as part of that integration and as a domestic objective, it's information that's pertinent and therefore part of the regime.