Justice Committee on Oct. 5th, 2026

[Julien Brazeau]

Once again, we are open to proposals. That said, we also want to avoid having an overly specific formula in the act, given the constantly changing nature of financial crime.

If we tie ourselves to a definition that is too strict, we risk tying the agency's hands and preventing it from investigating certain crimes in real time. That is kind of the flexibility we want it to have. Yes, we want this agency to focus on the most serious financial crimes, but we also want it to be flexible enough to define what those serious crimes are.

[Rhéal Fortin, Bloc, Rivière-du-Nord, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Brazeau.

[The Chair, Liberal, Iqra Khalid]

Thank you, Mr. Fortin.

We are going to move on to Mr. Lawton for five minutes in our second round.

Please go ahead, sir.

[Andrew Lawton, Conservative, Elgin—St. Thomas—London South, ON]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

Thank you to the numerous officials we have at the table right now.

I will be starting with you, Mr. Stewart. I want to build off your earlier exchange with Mr. Gill, in that the decision was clearly made to not prescribe the types of financial crimes that are going to be investigated here. You said that if the commissioner is established and the agency is created, then we'll figure out the scope of it.

I'm just a little perplexed because clearly we're trying to solve for a problem here. Why is the scope not something that is already defined? That effectively would justify the creation of the agency.

[Rob Stewart]

I'll say a couple of things and see if my colleagues want to add.

Picking up on the point that Mr. Brazeau just made, this is a very complex environment, generally speaking. We're talking about criminals who pursue numerous avenues of criminal activity in a very agile and technologically enabled way in the modern era. There is no specifying that “there's this crime with this bunch of people” and “this crime with others.” They're all in business and are doing many things, particularly at the organized crime level.

What we foresee here is really trying to look through the criminality at the predicate level to try to figure out where the money is going. That will be the focus of the agency. I did mention that the agency is not going to be very big, so this is very much a team game that we're going to be playing with other authorities. This is how it's going to have to work.

[Andrew Lawton, Conservative, Elgin—St. Thomas—London South, ON]

Thank you.

On that note, you alluded to the complexity of crime. Earlier, Mr. Baber was asking about terrorism. In that case, you might be looking at the money aspect, but someone else is going to be looking at the terror aspect of it.

Have we not introduced, now, another point of contention, basically? We're now going to have multiple agencies involved in the same investigation, more so than might already be the case.

[Rob Stewart]

I think that from my perspective, sir, that's actually a benefit—

[Andrew Lawton, Conservative, Elgin—St. Thomas—London South, ON]

That's a feature and not a bug, in your opinion.

[Rob Stewart]

Yes, exactly. What the agency has the potential to do is to be a hub and, therefore, help the system better understand the challenges we face and help the system organize itself and allocate resources. It won't be up to the agency to take over anybody's business. The RCMP will continue to have a mandate to fight financial crime. It will be about partnerships.

[Andrew Lawton, Conservative, Elgin—St. Thomas—London South, ON]

I'll use the OPP as an example because it's the provincial police force in the largest province in Canada. They have the capacity and they do work on financial crimes. If there's an investigation that the OPP is doing and they really want to keep it—for whatever reason—is there anything in this legislation that prevents this new agency from basically swooping in and taking that away from the OPP?

[Rob Stewart]

Not to my knowledge, in that sense—

[Andrew Lawton, Conservative, Elgin—St. Thomas—London South, ON]

Okay. The fiat could be used—

[Rob Stewart]

That's for prosecutions.

[Andrew Lawton, Conservative, Elgin—St. Thomas—London South, ON]

I'm sorry. I mean that the commissioner's discretion on investigation could be used to effectively bigfoot existing police agencies that already feel capable of handling these sorts of matters.

[Rob Stewart]

I would put it to you, sir, that this is not consistent with the conversations we're having with police forces, who are looking for help. They're not actually looking to try to retain all the work.

[Andrew Lawton, Conservative, Elgin—St. Thomas—London South, ON]

I take note of that. If there's nothing in the legislation that would prevent that, it might be something that as a committee we could look at as an amendment.

Not all financial crimes will be investigated by the financial crimes agency. Is that correct?

I'll let the record show that you nodded there, and I can move on.

[Rob Stewart]

Yes.

[Andrew Lawton, Conservative, Elgin—St. Thomas—London South, ON]

Will the RCMP still have to retain a financial crimes unit to deal with financial crimes that aren't going to be picked up by this new agency?

[Rob Stewart]

Yes.

If you'd like, my colleague from the RCMP can answer.

[Andrew Lawton, Conservative, Elgin—St. Thomas—London South, ON]

Yes, if you could, please, because now we are keeping some of your RCMP work on financial crimes behind. How is this not duplication?

[C/Supt Mike Saghbini]

In already talking to our colleagues, there will definitely be collaboration there. There are stand-alone things: money laundering and prosecutions, for example. There's the predicate offence, which is the drug dealing or...you're laundering dirty money. There are things that we will continue to be taking on, but there are money-laundering prosecutions where the predicate offence is not linked to organized crime, etc. There's asset recovery. They can work on accelerated asset recovery.

Working with regulators and with different administrative services could allow for more and quicker civil asset forfeitures. I think that's something where we could work in collaboration with the financial crimes agency, even in technological infrastructures, forensic accounting and some of the things that I believe the minister spoke about earlier, where they would deploy experts in accounting, forensic auditing, etc.

It would be a collaboration. I don't think that's taking it all. As you know, we have to work together. That's how I would explain it.

[The Chair, Liberal, Iqra Khalid]

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr. Lawton.

We're now moving on to Ms. Begum for five minutes.

[Doly Begum, Liberal, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

Thank you very much, Chair.

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so much for being here this afternoon.

I wanted to pick up on something that I asked the ministers previously, because we didn't get enough time to address it. It's about recognizing some of the efforts that our government is putting in place to address the challenges we're facing, especially with all the different types of digital crimes. I mean, I feel like both the industry and the justice committees are now discussing different types of fraud and financial crimes.

The question I asked Minister Anandasangaree was on the collaboration with RCMP leadership, as well as local law enforcement and overseas and other partners. You've come across many challenges. These challenges are why we need to have this bill in place. Would you be able to elaborate on some of the challenges you have come across and, of course, on Bill C-29 and how the FCA will address those challenges?

[Rob Stewart]

If you were to look at the current environment, you would identify several impediments to effectively pursuing financial crime. The first one is really a skills issue, where you need a very high level of understanding of the business environment and how money is moved through the system, as well as the ability to analyze and diagnose those activities. A reference was made a minute ago to digital or forensic accounting or digital forensics.

We want to use the agency to deepen the capacity of the system to focus on the more serious forms of financial crime, over and above what the RCMP has today. That's a skills issue, and that's existing in other parts of the country as well, because the local police of jurisdiction and even the securities commissions all feel a bit overwhelmed by the challenges they face.

The second issue is the Criminal Code, which kind of favours the charging of predicate crimes. The penalties for predicate crimes tend to be higher than for money laundering, and the sentencing is concurrent. In other words, in building a case to charge financial crime when you can charge the predicate offence and get a conviction faster, there's a disincentive there. This is something that's being examined by the justice department in their review of the criminal justice system.

On the prosecution side of the equation, skills are also an issue, where you have very experienced Crowns at the provincial level but not so experienced ones at the federal level. In fact, most of the work of the PPSC today focuses on drugs. I think that's some 70% of the cases they bring forward. They need to deepen their skill sets and their ability to build cases.

Then, I guess, there's the bar itself, which is not experienced in a lot of financial crimes cases because we haven't charged that many, and many of them get stayed or dropped. That's a body of knowledge and expertise that has to be built over time as well, but as it stands today, it's not as strong as it should be.

[Doly Begum, Liberal, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

Thank you for that.

Would anyone like to add anything?