Finance committee  They did not opine specifically on money laundering. The majority view was that the list of offences should be limited to serious economic crimes. Money laundering where a predicate offence is a bribery or a fraud would be part of that. At the same time, there also were some concerns about using this regime for situations that could involve organized crime, so it was at that point not included.

Finance committee  Thank you.

Finance committee  Thank you very much for the question. The offences that are included in the schedule are all of the nature of what we would call serious economic crimes, such as frauds and bribery, under the Criminal Code and also under the Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act, foreign bribery and the “books and records offence”.

Finance committee  I can explain the duty to inform victims. Our instructions from cabinet were to provide for victim reparations along the lines of what exists now in the Criminal Code. The challenge with doing that is that under this regime, the charge may be laid at a later stage, so it may not be practicable to notify victims.

Finance committee  Yes, certainly. I'd be happy to explain it. The amendment is by way of clarification of the policy intent, which was to require the prosecutor to give notice to victims as soon as practicable in the circumstances. The way it's written right now is somewhat confusing, because it could give the impression that the prosecutor could wait until the last minute, use option (b), and wait until the agreement is before the court before giving notice, but that's not the policy intent.

Finance committee  I suppose that's a bit of a subjective question. We felt that the rest were fairly clear. As I mentioned the last time, there was a lot of detail in this regime that's by way of guidance. A lot of it's taken from regimes that we have seen in other countries, so we didn't propose to change anything—

Finance committee  We're saying that this amendment clarifies the policy intent because after having been questioned about it, we realized it could be misleading.

Finance committee  Are you talking about the range of the financial amount or those in the schedule of offences?

Finance committee  There is a range. They can range, but they can be fairly significant, such as that for foreign bribery, as was mentioned, which is a 10-year sanction, and there are unlimited fines. Again, this is a regime that applies to companies that have been accused, and the companies have to identify individuals for prosecution for conduct flowing out of the same offence, so really the sanctions....

Finance committee  The company can through them, but it's the company, so the company can't be imprisoned. But you're right that obviously the actions would be committed by an individual, and the company would have an obligation to identify the individual so that individual could be prosecuted. It's not at all a way of getting individuals off the hook.

Finance committee  That's right. It has an obligation to make its best efforts to identify implicated individuals.

Finance committee  It would be up to whoever was delegated the authority to negotiate them and to determine that.

Finance committee  I suppose it's possible.

Finance committee  It's a discretionary tool. It applies to companies and not individuals, so there's no charter issue. That would be the argument that companies make now, that they are potentially eligible for operations under the jurisdiction of the U.K. or the U.S., but not in Canada.

Finance committee  The prosecutor has to be convinced that negotiating the agreement is in the public interest and appropriate in the circumstances, and then there are a series of factors the prosecutor has to consider in determining whether that's the case. There are the circumstances in which the act or omission came to light.