This was back in the 1980s and 1990s, during the investigation of Hezbollah in Quebec and Ontario. They were looking at it and had evidence at that point in time that suggested stolen vehicles were being used to fund Hezbollah, both here in Canada and over in Lebanon. That was documented back in the late 1980s and early 1990s and produced in one of their national reports. That's accessible on the Internet.
Also, in various meetings I had throughout Europe in dealing with the Interpol offices, a lot of information was surfacing on financing terrorism with stolen vehicles, especially through European cases. Europe has 3.3 million vehicles on their stolen-vehicle database, so they're seeing a lot more of that activity than we do.
I mentioned Project Globe a little while ago. We were looking at hundreds of vehicles that were travelling off to the Middle East. We've never before seen this number of vehicles going over there. A lot of intelligence agencies have been extremely interested in that information. We've never seen that before, and they're basing this on a lot of the funding and stuff that has been sewn up in bank accounts and frozen; these are very liquid assets for them to travel back and forth.
I was contacted by one of the assistant U.S. attorneys at Washington. He was very interested in what we were seeing in West Africa. He was seeing similar things happening through the United States. A lot of of goods were travelling to western Africa and actually finding their way up into Morocco and actually crossing over into Spain and heading back into Europe. There's a lot of activity in traffic of vehicles.
The traffic aspect of stolen vehicles is astronomical, especially internationally. When you put it all together into a global perspective, Canada is only a part of this, but this is what we're here to represent--to try to prevent more cars from going away.