Really, the Emergencies Act was time limited, and it was for a specific event.
For example, the information on the designated people that was given to the banks, the financial institutions and others, had to do with the funding related to the illegal blockades, to ensure that the funding that was received or disbursed was stopped.
Once this emergency measure is revoked, as it has been, the banks cannot use that information, for example, to submit an STR to me, to say, “Hey, we got this name from the RCMP. Looking backwards, yes, the person is a criminal, so we're going to give you this.” If they gave that to me and said, “The RCMP gave me this name, so this is my threshold for reporting to you”, that would not be something that I would be comfortable disclosing back to the RCMP, because it's not something that the RCMP—and I use “RCMP” as a generic term for law enforcement here—or law enforcement can go to a bank about and direct it to send an STR to FINTRAC on any particular individual. There are legal requirements. If the RCMP or any law enforcement wants that information, they need production orders. They need warrants from the court. They cannot simply walk in and say, “Please submit an STR on Barry MacKillop to FINTRAC” so that they can then give that to me as intelligence and I can get a production order and charge someone.
I'm not a constitutional expert or a lawyer, but that is contrary to how our court system works. There is an independence. The threshold is met. The banking system or the financial institutions would submit reports to us on people whose transactions they believe or they suspect would be relevant to money-laundering or terrorist-financing activities.
The fact that they were either supporting or disbursing the funds related to an illegal blockade has nothing to do with money laundering or terrorist financing. We would not get a suspicious transaction report, and I do not believe that the intent or the reality would be that the banks would keep the list of these names once the process had been undertaken to unfreeze the accounts, as Madame Jacques was mentioning the other day. These accounts will be unfrozen. There's no lasting black mark on these individuals. They simply could not use that money, or whatever it was that they had, to support the illegal blockade, as per the Emergencies Act when it was in place.