Thank you very much for the question.
I'm all in favour of greater enforcement, including naming and shaming and every other possible way that we can attempt to keep corrupt funds from being processed or laundered through our Canadian financial institutions. As well, in many cases the money is not just passing through our institutions on its way elsewhere but is actually being parked in Canada by the buying of real estate or other luxury items.
As you've heard, I'm not familiar with the Magnitsky Act, but it sounds very much like it's part of prevention of money laundering at the international level. For me, the problem in Canada is our lack of enforcement of the mechanisms that are already in place.
Let me just take two examples. Financial institutions are required to do reporting to FINTRAC. FINTRAC gets a lot of information, but has very few resources to actually do anything with that information. Secondly, we're told that the financial institutions' reporting, other than maybe the big six banks, is very thin.
You probably know that the Federation of Law Societies of Canada avoided being brought into the proceeds of crime act or the money laundering act in the Supreme Court of Canada on the basis of privilege, etc. Those law societies now feel.... British Columbia, for example, has a set of regulations that lawyers are supposed to follow. The problem is not that the regulations are terrible, but that the law society is not proactive in ensuring that those things are happening.
In the case of the real estate market, there were lawyers in British Columbia who were obviously facilitating those huge purchases of luxury houses in Vancouver, and to my knowledge at least, there has been no policing of that. Now that it has hit the news, we might find a little, but, basically the law society is not proactive.
I see the enforcement side of this as a bigger problem than the legal framework side.