I want to say thank you to my esteemed colleague.
There are probably three things we're trying to achieve.
The first one is to dissuade corporations from hiding assets. Certainly I think those who engage in an illicit activity—whether money laundering, terrorist financing or tax evasion—should be concerned, because we're going to put light on the type of corporation they may try to use in order to achieve that.
The second thing is to improve, I would say, the tracing and freezing of financial assets. There is more legislation that calls for us to take action, for example, to combat terrorism. I think the fact that north of 120 countries in the world have agreed to create such registries tells us that the world is going in one direction. We want to make sure Canada is at the forefront and leading, because we were one of the few nations that created the Financial Action Task Force of the G20.
The third one is to improve corporate accountability and to make sure that Canadians have trust when they're dealing with corporate institutions.
For me, it's dissuading corporations from hiding assets, improving trust, and improving the tracing and freezing of financial assets when we need to do so.
I would say more generally, for Canadians watching us, that it's for Canadians to be able to search online to see who owns a particular company. I think that would be relevant, and I would say that for the vast majority of corporations and small and medium-sized companies, what we're asking is not going to be a large burden, because they already have annual reports for which they already collect a number of pieces of information. They already collect the names and the date of birth. Now they'll have to provide the residential address and citizenship.
On the one hand, we're improving transparency. On the other hand, we're very mindful that the vast majority of all businesses in Canada are law-abiding. This is really to target the bad actors and make sure that in the case of those bad actors, we have more information and we can identify them and go after them if they are breaking any law.
For the vast majority of Canadian corporations and small and medium-sized businesses, I would think that this is not an extra burden. They already do an annual report and they already have to report when they have a change in directorship. I would say it's really balanced.
We want to make sure that Canada stands out in the world as one of these countries, which really means making sure that we have all the tools available to dissuade money laundering, terrorist financing and tax evasion, and I think this is going to go a long way towards that.