Thank you very much, Mr. Weiler. I believe it's on your invitation that I'm here, so I appreciate that. I also know the work that a certain Professor Weiler has been doing in this area, so thank you for all that you do.
I really think, and have advocated for quite some time, that Canada needs a national strategy. It has to be both federal and provincial. You can't have some provinces doing civil forfeiture and others not. We have two provinces at this point that have no civil forfeiture legislation. Then, in the criminal realm, you see prosecutions for money laundering in Ontario, but you don't see them in British Columbia. You need a holistic approach, for one thing.
Then, what are the problems? Let's, as I say, fundamentally shake the legislation. The United States is able to deal with money-laundering asset forfeiture quite efficiently, and these are complex cases that it deals with. However, there are a lot of constraints in our criminal justice system that make it very difficult for police to investigate and for prosecutors to prosecute. A lot of it is symptomatic of the larger systems, such as disclosure, time frames, and the difficulty of obtaining production orders and search warrants. So, there are a whole plethora of things that we really should be looking at to properly deal with this.
Certainly, there have been complaints about aspects of the proceeds of crime legislation for a long time. Something as simple as this.... If you look at the Proceeds of Crime (Money Laundering) and Terrorist Financing Act, you will see that there are certain businesses that have to report cash over $10,000, but not all have to. For example, the car industry is exempted. Out here, we have seen cars purchased with cash for $250,000, and it's dirty money. By the time it reaches the bank, it's clean money; it has gone through the car dealership. So, we have this haphazard system. We have to just shake it and really get serious.
I do work in other parts of the world. You will see in developing countries that they have all the legislation, but then when you dig down, nothing is being enforced. Nothing is happening. However, to the outside eye, it looks good. In some ways, that's where we're at right now. It looks good, but when you dig down, nothing is happening, in a manner of speaking.