Thank you, Chair.
It's wonderful to join the committee this afternoon. I want to say thank you for the opportunity and also applaud the committee, all individuals here from all parties, for the great work they've done on this bill.
If I can just go back in time a little bit, in my first session of Parliament, I had the good fortune of participating in a study entitled “Confronting Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing: Moving Canada Forward”. It was published in November of 2018 and we travelled to the U.K.; Washington, D.C.; Toronto; and New York. We had extensive missions. There was a rotation between the Senate and the House every five years when this study was taking place, and the first recommendation was—I'm just looking at it now—to implement a public registry, a beneficial ownership registry with the threshold of 25%. I was reading a list of recommendations just now, so I'm very happy to see that this is going forward. I applaud the chair and Minister Champagne and the entire team for the work that's been done. This is a huge step forward.
Sasha, I kind of nodded to you when you were giving your comments. I also had the good fortune of growing up and living in British Columbia before I moved to Ontario and became an MP among other things. I wonder if you could elaborate on just how big a step the implementation of this public beneficial registry is in combatting money laundering, especially within the real estate sector in British Columbia.