Evidence of meeting #52 for Public Accounts in the 45th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was system.
A video is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Philip Lawrence Conservative Northumberland—Clarke, ON
That represents less than 1% of the total contributions made that have been deployed. I didn't see this in the report, but if you know it, I'd appreciate hearing it.
When did the government start to contribute to the fund?
Deputy Auditor General, Office of the Auditor General
I'll look to my colleague for that answer.
Markirit Armutlu Principal, Office of the Auditor General
The initiative started in 2021.
Conservative
Philip Lawrence Conservative Northumberland—Clarke, ON
In 2021, we started making a contribution, and we have less than 1% of it deployed.
What about results? Are there any tangible results that the accelerating coal transition investment program can point to, such as a reduction in carbon?
Deputy Auditor General, Office of the Auditor General
One of the recommendations that we made was for Global Affairs to be more transparent with reporting on the results of these programs. Again, these are initiatives that are just being undertaken, so they're early days. It's important, though, for Global Affairs to report on both the progress that is being made and the obstacles that are being encountered in terms of accessing this money.
Conservative
Philip Lawrence Conservative Northumberland—Clarke, ON
I don't want to mis-paraphrase what was said in the report, so if my words are incorrect, please correct them.
I believe that in five years of the program existing, since 2021, there has not been any significant public reporting, despite Canadian taxpayers investing over $1 billion.
Deputy Auditor General, Office of the Auditor General
We indeed found that there had been a significant period of time when reporting publicly hadn't happened. That is again the foundation for our recommendation.
Conservative
Philip Lawrence Conservative Northumberland—Clarke, ON
With the contribution of $1 billion, are there, to your knowledge, any safeguards that Canadian taxpayers will receive any of this back? What are the repayment terms, in other words?
Deputy Auditor General, Office of the Auditor General
This is a contribution. There is a repayment schedule that will start in 2032. It will follow a schedule of repayments. It will take almost 20 years to repay fully.
From the taxpayer's perspective, this money should come back in some form. Eventually, though, that's something that our office or Parliament may be interested in following up on.
Conservative
Philip Lawrence Conservative Northumberland—Clarke, ON
As of this date, we haven't received any interest back on our loan. Is that correct?
Deputy Auditor General, Office of the Auditor General
I don't have the answer to that question.
We didn't identify any problems with the agreement and with the implementation of the agreement in terms of the logistics.
Conservative
Philip Lawrence Conservative Northumberland—Clarke, ON
If you wouldn't mind providing me that in writing afterward, on $1 billion, that's between $25 million and $50 million in interest. I think it's important that taxpayers know whether they're receiving any type of return on this contribution of $1 billion.
To sum up in the 30 seconds or so of time that I have left, this Liberal government contributed $1 billion to the accelerating coal transition investment program. Less than 1% has has been deployed, and there has been no reporting on that. As of today, my understanding—I stand to be corrected here—is that we haven't received a dollar of that back. In fact, I'm dubious as to whether we'll ever receive that money back.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Deputy Auditor General, Office of the Auditor General
Mr. Chair, could I get one minute?
Deputy Auditor General, Office of the Auditor General
In terms of a clarification, less than 1% of the funding has been used for projects to be operationalized. If we do have information on any amounts that have been coming back, we will provide it to the committee, but I think the department may be in the best position to answer that as well.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative John Williamson
Thank you.
We're going to our next member.
Ms. Yip, you have the floor for five minutes, please.
Liberal
Jean Yip Liberal Scarborough—Agincourt, ON
Thank you, Chair.
Nine reports were presented this morning. That's great. Thank you for all your hard work.
My questions are on the FINTRAC report.
FINTRAC increased the number of businesses supervised and increasingly relied on self-attestations provided by businesses to assess whether they were meeting their legal obligations. Why did they rely on self-attestations? Is it effective?
Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General
I think their ability to supervise a growing number of businesses—it's up to about 36,000 entities that they must supervise—was weakened by some of their tools just not being there to support them.
In order to deal with that much volume, they took a bit of a risk-based approach, but this light touch to reviews and assessments I think weakens the assurance that businesses are following the anti-money laundering law. Self-attestations are only as good as the follow-up that you do afterwards.
I think this was a mechanism for them to deal with the increase in volume. For me, it increases the risk as well, because you don't have the same level of assurance that people are following the law.
Liberal
Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General
We did make a few recommendations in this audit about leveraging technology in improving efficiency.
There is a system available that, around the world, other organizations like FINTRAC use. Actually, 70 other countries use an IT system to help with their supervision and development of financial intelligence. While FINTRAC is trying to develop its own system, they don't have a good timeline, and they're not exactly sure how much that will cost. This is a short-term solution that maybe they could use.
We recommended that they consider that at least, as a temporary solution, because surveillance and financial intelligence is only effective when it's done in a timely way.
October 29th, 2026 / 10:50 a.m.
Liberal
Jean Yip Liberal Scarborough—Agincourt, ON
Two years after a cyber-incident forced FINTRAC to take its registration system off-line, it still hasn't cleared the backlog of registration, renewal and other requests. Why has it taken so long?
Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General
That is an excellent question. You should probably ask FINTRAC why it has taken so long.
The system was part of a cyber-incident and taken off-line in order to safeguard the data in it and the other systems of the centre. It took a while for them to find a temporary workaround solution. There are about 2,500 registrations sitting in a backlog. The centre has a team dedicated to trying to address those. That team is getting through about 150 cases a week, but it's a long time to wait to be able to register. You need a registration in order to be able to operate legally in Canada, if you want a bank account and things like that.
It is important that they get to how to better leverage technology so that they can move away from these temporary manual solutions.
Liberal
Jean Yip Liberal Scarborough—Agincourt, ON
Yes. The temporary manual solutions are really slowing it down, at 150 cases.
You mentioned the use of technology. Could you give some examples of how technology could move this along faster?
Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General
To give a great example about how FINTRAC could leverage technology, I would talk about their other role, which is the role of generating financial intelligence and sharing it with law enforcement in order to support investigations, or to start investigations, linked to money laundering or other financial crimes. They receive over 65 million reports of financial transactions from banks throughout a year. Right now, they don't have the analytical tools and capabilities to really deal with all of that. A lot of their processes of identifying whether transactions are by the same person or business, or whether they are suspicious transactions, are done manually.
This is a great place where technology could help leverage efficiencies. It takes about four months, on average, to generate financial intelligence for a law enforcement agency when they're looking for assistance. In a day and age when financial transactions happen very quickly, waiting four months for financial intelligence is not an effective way to discharge responsibilities.