Madam Speaker, it is with pleasure that I rise to speak to Bill C-22 at third reading to address some of the very important issues about the legislation which would create the new money laundering oversight agency that would be positioned to help protect Canadians from organized crime and be part of a global effort to combat the insidious and pervasive nature of organized crime.
Like most business activities, organized crime has become very much a global enterprise. As such, Canada's procrastination and tardiness in not addressing this issue earlier is unconscionable. It is unfortunate that the government had not seen the need to address this issue earlier.
As hon. members have noted, we are lagging behind other members of the G-8 and the OECD in terms of pursuing this very important initiative of establishing within our country a sound oversight agency to reduce the incidence of money laundering.
It is a huge issue. The estimates of money laundering are even difficult to get a handle on. Some estimates in Canada are as low as $5 billion or $8 billion and some are as high as $20 billion. There is a huge variance and disparity on this one issue. That indicates the degree to which we are really only beginning to understand it.
One concern I have about this legislation is that it addresses in many ways yesterday's issue, that is, the very conventional means of money laundering. Nowhere in the legislation or in the new agency do I see some sort of commitment that the agency will have the type of resources and technological strength to address some of the current and emerging issues of technologically oriented money laundering.
With the sophistication of financial instruments and the inability of sovereign governments to track either cross-border financial transactions or intra-state transactions, whether they be derivatives, which are not considered to be a particularly sophisticated financial instrument in the current context, the fact is that increasingly we are dealing with these sophisticated financial instruments and the ability of any agency to track transactions, large or small, intra-state or cross-border, is a real challenge. I would hope that this agency will have not only the resources to pursue technologically driven approaches to the very serious issue of money laundering, but beyond that would work with the private sector and many of the companies involved on the Internet security side to develop private sector solutions.
The technology being developed by both American and Canadian companies in these areas is very advanced. I would hope that the government would do a better job at seeking input from the private sector in developing more sophisticated approaches to this problem than it has in other areas.
The accountability of this new agency has been of significant concern and remains a significant concern. Amendments have helped and have been constructive in assisting to ensure that there will be some level of accountability for this agency and some level of rigorous reporting that has the capacity to provide some checks and balances. That is all well and good, but we have to be vigilant as parliamentarians to ensure that we provide mechanisms to protect Canadians against these all powerful new agencies.
I do not think that any law-abiding Canadian would have any difficulty with getting tough on money laundering. That being the case, it is very important to separate the powers of these agencies. For example, I expressed concerns at the time of the creation of the new Revenue Canada agency that it could emerge as an IRS style agency, Godzilla the tax collector, which would have the power to persecute and relentlessly pursue individual Canadian taxpayers, and in many cases bring about undue suffering and unfair treatment of ordinary law-abiding, tax-paying Canadians.
The more powerful the agency, the more difficult it is for individual Canadians to muster the resources to fight it. My concern has been and continues to be with the new money laundering agency that we ensure that any sharing of information between this new agency and the Revenue Canada agency is done under very strict conditions.
For example, if the new money laundering agency sees some level of evidence to suggest money laundering and feels that sharing that information with Revenue Canada would help bolster the new agency's case in pursuing a case of money laundering against an individual or a group of individuals, that could be seen as being reasonable.
If, on the other hand, there is not sufficient evidence to suggest money laundering, but if the new agency sees some evidence that there may be some level of tax evasion and shares that information with the new Revenue Canada agency, I think that would be overstepping the boundaries and would be leading to an incredibly powerful, turbo-charged Revenue Canada agency that could wreak havoc on the lives of ordinary Canadians. We have to be careful to ensure that there is a Chinese wall between the Revenue Canada agency and this new money laundering agency.
The nebulous nature of the description of suspicious transactions is also disturbing. It seems to be a very qualitative description that is very difficult to narrow in a substantive way.
The issue of resources is very important. Certainly the RCMP calls this legislation long overdue, but we have to ensure that the RCMP on a national level is funded properly to pursue some of these activities and work with this agency. It is critical to ensure that we not create these new agencies without providing some level of resources to ensure that they can do their jobs and at the same time maintain our traditional policing of white collar crimes through the RCMP in a way that is consistent and which provides over a period of time a reasonable level of support and resources. The government has not provided ongoing and consistent levels of support to the RCMP, and in fact has starved the activities of the RCMP on a national level.
The Progressive Conservative Party supports this legislation. We support some amendments which in my opinion improve the accountability of the new agency. This is a step in the right direction but the government is prone to taking baby steps as opposed to more substantive steps.
While we do recognize that this is a step forward, a lot more needs to be done to ensure that ordinary Canadians are protected against organized crime. In the future we must work more proactively with our trading partners and with our partners in the G-8 and the OECD to develop solutions and introduce them within our borders earlier as opposed to always playing catch up and lagging behind our partners on something as important as money laundering and organized crime.