Finance committee  They are not in Canada. They're for the most part American and English. When they get to a certain point and say they need money to bribe somebody, we say goodbye.

Finance committee  When you try to trace these accounts, how many people are going to actually do something in Canada that's iffy and then have the account in their personal name? When we trace these, they're in joint ventures, they're in lawyers' trust accounts, they're in corporations. They're multi-layered; they're in all sorts of other trust arrangements.

Finance committee  The other reason you don't get this compliance is that the original deed in the first place was probably criminal. So unless the tax people say they're not going to investigate what happened in the first place to get the cash that then went offshore....

Finance committee  And this has gone through the Alberta bank failures, to Castor Holdings in Montreal, to Confederation Trust. I've done all of these things. So on that particular basis, this IFRS has abolished all the prohibitions.

Finance committee  I'm not too sure I got your final point either.

Finance committee  No. Just to come back to the point, this IFRS came into Canada just January 1 of this year, so we haven't even seen the first-quarter results.

Finance committee  Absolutely they have to get worse, because we have thrown away closures we've made over the years. I've probably done a dozen of the big financial failures in Canada involving financial institutions, and one of the tricks they use there is to not collect the cash but to keep on increasing the assets of the loan company and increasing their profits.

Finance committee  My feeling is that you'd clean up some of the act's past sins, so to speak. But I don't see that this helps at all as long as you can keep on working Ponzi frauds and things of that nature. Yes, amnesty is okay. Bring in the low-hanging fruit. But I've never really liked that concept, because it doesn't solve the major problem.

Finance committee  I'm coming from the bias that for years and years we've been doing these major director-officer-auditor-corporate failures. We also do some of the matrimonial, and so on. But when I look at the dollars that I have personally seen over the years go offshore, the vast majority is as a result of some sort of securities trickery.

Finance committee  I won't take 10 minutes. The main point that I've noticed in testifying before standing committees is that usually I'm off topic, because some of what I'm doing, of course, overlaps into other areas, and I keep getting the comment back, “You're not sort of in our compartment right now.”

Justice committee  I think the U.S. model was workable. To be frank, the Bush administration, towards the end, put pressure on the SEC. You saw a number of meltdowns in the last term. If you go back to the prior periods in the U.S., you can see... I know for sure that there are frauds that are caught in the U.S.

Justice committee  I think a combination of what's happening in the U.K. and the U.S. is workable in Canada. The whole point that has caused immense concern to investors, which will probably result in many of them withdrawing from the Canadian market, is that there is just no one to really tell your story to, to pursue it.

Justice committee  I thought you were warming up to tell me to stop.

Justice committee  No, that's fine.

Justice committee  Thank you. My background is in investigating many of the big frauds in Canada. If you went through the list of major situations, I think you'd find we were probably involved in two-thirds of them. I'm not unsympathetic to the comments from the minister in New Brunswick, but I think we have to get realistic about what it's going to take to prevent many of these Ponzi frauds and pyramid schemes and so on.