Madam Speaker, I was reading an article on Canadian Business Online from September 24, 2007. The headline was “...Canada's losing war against white-collar crime”. The author was talking about the RCMP's launch of the integrated market enforcement team, IMET, which was an elite squad of investigators who were supposed to work together to crack down on white collar crime, but the results were extremely disappointing.
In the United States, the justice department there racked up more than 1,200 convictions against high-level executives from Enron and other companies like that in the last five years, and the IMET had only managed to get two. There were 1,200 in the United States and only two in Canada, and both of them were against the same person.
It went on to say:
Just ask people on Bay Street who they are afraid of. It’s not the cops, it’s not the [Ontario Securities Commission]. It’s the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission because they have real teeth.
In spite of all of that, President Obama in the United States is re-regulating because he and the Americans do not feel that their system is adequate, and our system is so much worse than their old system was.
When does the member think Canada is going to get tough on white collar crime?