Mr. Speaker, before handing over to other speakers for members' statements and oral question period, I was in the process of explaining the voluntary disclosure mechanism provided for in the legislation.
All things considered, the timing of that interruption turned out not to be too bad, because this mechanism is in fact at the heart of the privacy protection regime, while at the same time promoting efficiency in the work and fight against money laundering.
Let me explain how it works. The reality is that none of the data collected by FINTRAC can be accessed directly by police, the intelligence service, the secret service or other agencies.
These agencies may, however, voluntarily disclose information. For example, someone might say they are with the RCMP and that they are investigating so and so, who is suspected of laundering money in one financial institution or another, and so on, and submit this information to FINTRAC. This centre then checks the information received against its own to determine if it has any additional information worth disclosing to the agency that made the voluntary disclosure. The procedure is pretty tight, with committees ensuring that this additional information is disclosed only if it is deemed necessary for the purposes of the investigation in question.
It is somewhat like a black box mechanism—really quite ingenious—that prevents the organizations from directly consulting the vast data base and the incredible amount of information it contains but that, at the same time, enables this information to be useful to an investigation.
Once FINTRAC has established that the information is pertinent, it is disclosed to the organization in question. However, FINTRAC will not undertake the investigation or legal proceedings. That is not its role.
Earlier this morning, we spoke of the committee's work. I was somewhat surprised and rather amused to see Liberals and Conservatives trying to capitalize on or score political points with the work of our committee.
I believe that the committee's work was useful. An amendment proposed by the Liberals was that an organization report to the committee annually. This organization did not seem to be the most appropriate one because it was under the authority of the intelligence service, with which FINTRAC is not really aligned. We supported the amendment in order to continue debate on this matter. It proved to be a good approach because the Conservatives put forward a proposal which, in my opinion, is much more interesting than the original one. It has two components. Initially, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada will be asked to report every two years on the privacy aspect of the bill. I was very pleased with this because I had placed a great deal of emphasis on this issue. We must carefully examine the privacy aspect.
Under the law, the Privacy Commissioner already has the authority to investigate if she receives a complaint. I did not believe that was sufficient because having the right to conduct a systematic investigation every two years and having the duty to do so are not the same thing.
Indeed, in order to receive a privacy-related complaint, the individual whose rights were violated must be aware of it. Of course, if someone had illegal access to your private files, chances are you will not know about it. Thus, it becomes difficult to file a complaint.
I believe that some work was accomplished by everyone, and the committee was able to achieve a significant result.
The committee also discussed a Liberal amendment to allow the Canada revenue agency to directly consult FINTRAC's files, in order to be more effective. I strongly opposed that amendment, because I felt it would create a major breach in privacy protection, as I explained earlier.
Why, for efficiency's sake, would we allow an organization to directly consult these files, considering that the Canada revenue agency can, like any other government agency, submit a voluntary disclosure to FINTRAC and eventually receive relevant information, if any, from FINTRAC's database? The committee agreed with me that we should not open that breach, and I was very pleased about that.
I think this is a good bill. It has been improved by the committee, and it definitely deserves to be supported by the House. The next logical step for the government would be to work on the issue of tax havens. Tax havens are places where a lot of money laundering is going on. These countries have tax and financial rules that are much more lax than ours. This is why terrorists use them to fund their activities, or simply for money laundering purposes.
By signing agreements with tax havens, we are opening a door and making the work of those people easier. The second reason to work on the tax havens issue is obviously the fiscal inequity. Major companies invest in Barbados, Bermuda or other tax havens of this kind and do not pay taxes in Canada thanks to these little manoeuvres. This makes for a lot of lost revenue for Canada.
By addressing tax havens, we would be killing two birds with one stone: we would be fighting money laundering and terrorist activity financing, and we would be broadening the tax base, and that would create greater fiscal equity among corporations. I believe that the Minister of Finance has opened the door on this matter a few times. He has done so in this House. When I spoke to him about it, he said he would review the issue. Yesterday, in committee, following a question from my Bloc Québécois colleague, the hon. member for Joliette, he also showed interest in this issue.
I am very pleased to see this openness. All that I hope for is that this openness will translate into concrete action in the short term. We have to take action in this matter. In my opinion it would be a natural extension of the bill before us today.
In closing, my colleagues from the Bloc Québécois and I would be pleased to support this bill. In my opinion it demonstrates interesting progress.