On February 7, 2018, the Minister of Finance released a public consultation paper with respect to PCMLTFA. Parliamentary committee hearings on the statute are taking place this month in Ottawa.
Since 1989, Canada's Criminal Code has contained the offence of laundering as well as possession of the proceeds of crime. In 1993, Parliament enacted a federal statute, which required financial institutions to keep records of certain transactions. That legislation was replaced in 2000 by the PCMLTFA—I'll call it the act from here on in—which has been amended many times since.
The act moved Canada from a recording to a reporting regime and created Canada's financial intelligence unit, FINTRAC. The legislation was a response to international commitments made by Canada.
Although the Criminal Code falls under the purview of the Attorney General of Canada, the Minister of Finance is accountable for the act. Approximately 100,000 businesses and financial institutions are now required to make large cash transaction reports and suspicious transaction reports to FINTRAC. Some industries have additional reporting requirements. In this regard, casinos must also make cash disbursement reports.
FINTRAC performs audits on reporting entities and does so every two years at B.C.'s casinos. It has the power to impose administrative monetary penalties. The largest penalty ever imposed with respect to casinos was meted out to BCLC in 2010. BCLC, the B.C. Lottery Corporation, appealed the administrative monetary penalty to the Federal Court. The case was resolved in 2016 in what is best described as a draw. By this time, FINTRAC was satisfied with the quality of BCLC reporting. In addition, its entire administrative monetary penalty structure had been called into question because of unrelated cases, which questioned the lack of objective criteria being used to determine the quantum of a penalty.
I'll skip ahead, Mr. Chair.
It is beneficial to review the latest FATF mutual evaluation of Canada's legislation, which points to various deficiencies in Canada's existing scheme. In the past, it has almost always been through this form of international peer pressure that substantive changes have been made to Canada's various criminal and other federal legislation related to proceeds of crime, money laundering, and corruption. The FATF review can be found at the link provided.
There are numerous references to casinos in the FATF report. I will not comment on the issues of beneficial ownership and whistle-blowers, with which the minister is already very familiar and which are covered in some depth in the consultation document.
Mr. Chair, I hope it was of some use to the committee to provide a little bit of an overview of the contents of that recommendation document. As I say, it is a piece of a much larger report that we're expecting to receive at the end of the month.