Mr. Chair, if you'll permit me, I'll back up slightly and say that increasing the overall transparency of ownership information related to corporations has been an ongoing, multi-year journey with the provinces and territories. Obviously, incorporation in Canada is a split jurisdiction. You're able to incorporate provincially, territorially or federally. It's not for us to be able to dictate that corporations have to incorporate in one place or another.
That being said, at the very beginning of this process we started by getting an agreement with all of the ministers of finance of the provinces, territories and federal government. The agreement was to ban bearer shares, first, and second, to collect beneficial ownership information at the level of the corporation. We then got a secondary agreement from all of the provinces and territories and the federal government to ensure that there was lawful access to that information at the place in situ, which is the corporate headquarters.
We've consulted with the provinces and territories about the beneficial ownership registry portion of that. There is no deadline set at this point for the beneficial ownership registry portion, but so far we have concurrence with step one, which is holding the information, and step two, which is getting law enforcement access to it in situ. Now we are advancing step three, which is the holding of the registry and making it public. We are committed to working with the provinces and territories on step three.