Thank you. I'm happy to answer the question.
The use of Canadian shell companies to conceal the true ownership of businesses is a real problem. FINTRAC estimates that 70% of money laundering cases in Canada involve a shell corporation. The ability to determine who are the rightful owners of those corporations is important not just for money laundering purposes, but for tax evasion purposes and other purposes as well.
The government, as you've said, introduced a bill, and the federal registry went live just a few weeks ago now. This is a searchable and publicly accessible registry with information. Some information will be shared directly with some of our enforcement partners—that is, information that is not made public—but again, the goal is to help our enforcement partners determine who are the rightful owners.
One limitation of the federal open banking regime is that federal incorporations account for only about 15% of corporations in Canada; therefore, there's a need to collaborate with provinces. Since 2016, a working group has been established of federal, provincial and territorial partners to discuss beneficial ownership, and all provinces or territories have put in place some laws that require at least the gathering of information on beneficial ownership.
The Province of Quebec took a head start in the creation of a publicly accessible regime. The Province of British Columbia has now committed to doing that as well. At the federal level, we're working closely with our provincial partners to see how we can integrate those provincial regimes to ensure we have a full pan-Canadian framework that would be accessible for our enforcement entities.