Thank you, Mr. Chair, as well as to all our witnesses for all the work you do and for coming to share your expertise with us today so we can help with this review.
I'd like to talk about FINTRAC in general. I have spoken with a number of credit unions that say that they are spending more and more money to comply with the federal side. There are many touchpoints, and FINTRAC is one of them.
This can be open to the group. FINTRAC collects a lot of data, and it does so on a lot of transactions. Right now, legislatively, it can only utilize that data on a one-to-one basis if it's regarding money laundering or terrorism financing. Then it works with the proper authority to tackle that from there. They cannot share information, by law, because they don't want to compromise privacy. Nevertheless, we know that in places under provincial jurisdiction, such as private mortgages, etc., there are a lot of cash sales that are not picked up by CMHC or by OSFI.
My proposal, as part of some sort of renewal of FINTRAC through this review, would be to see if we can take what is already very costly to credit unions and other reporting agents under this and allow FINTRAC to aggregate so that no personal, private information is compromised, allowing policy-makers to have a better understanding of the markets. For example, real estate professionals do tell me that FINTRAC takes quite a bit of their time. Again, I haven't seen the paperwork, so I can't judge that, but I bet you that if they had a return showing a little bit more information on cash sales in their area or which provinces are the flashpoints for troubles with real estate, they would probably value that. Is this something that you think would be a welcome addition as far as making that information publicly available?