Absolutely, and thank you for your question.
Let's start with the ability for anyone to search by country of residence and the name of the corporation. This is information that would already be collected by the registry itself. It would be part of the service address. We want to differentiate that information field from jurisdiction of residence, which is solely for tax purposes. We're not recommending that this field be publicly accessible, due to privacy considerations.
On being able to search by country of residence, if you would imagine yourself in the global south, for instance, and you suspect that the nephew of a mayor or the nephew of an official is perhaps involved in money laundering or has a really poor reputation of stealing from national treasuries, you can search beneficial owners by the country of residence and where their service address might be, which would be really powerful as a tool.
Searching by the name of the corporation is a function that the U.K. registry has, and it allows for reverse searching. If you don't know the name of the beneficial owner, you can look up the name of the corporation, for instance. That would be incredibly helpful. In some of our other recommendations, we just want to ensure that all publicly accessible data is searchable. We included some specifics on that. We believe that this is in line with the minister's vision for this bill.
Adding hybrid offences as well is something that we heard from committee members. In fact, this is a position we've long had at Publish What you Pay Canada and Transparency International Canada. We think a hybrid offence can be used in those instances when you're dealing with really sophisticated criminals who have the ability to financially absorb penalties. We're talking about large organized crime or terrorist organizations where $200,000 is something that they can absorb absolutely. We think this will be a measure just for those offences where they are knowingly committing that offence.
With the ID numbers, we just think this is a progressive measure. It would be in line with what the United States is doing. We aren't asking companies to hold the government-issued ID itself, but rather the ID number, so it minimizes any privacy and information intrusion.