Information & Ethics committee  I was not invited to appear before the committees of the House, but I did appear before a Senate committee to speak to Bill C-51, and I made presentations to the appropriate committees of both Houses. All I can do is make the strongest possible case to parliamentarians. It is better if I am invited, as we can then discuss the proposed recommendations.

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good afternoon, honourable members. I am pleased to address our office's main estimates, and with me today are Daniel Nadeau, our chief financial officer; and Patricia Kosseim, our general counsel. In my time, I will outline our fiscal outlook, describe how we are managing rising demands, and announce our new privacy priorities, which will influence our work in the future.

Finance committee  I have no particular opinion on its capacity to analyze the information, but there is no question that it will receive much more information.

Finance committee  As I was saying, in terms of administration, I am the only person with the authority to review FINTRAC's activities, and only when it comes to privacy issues.

Finance committee  I think that what's missing is an administrative body that could carry out a more general review of the legality and effectiveness of FINTRAC's activities. Some of my colleagues today have mentioned that FINTRAC did a good job of obtaining and analyzing the information submitted to it, but that this did not lead to concrete law enforcement activities.

Finance committee  As I explained previously, objective standards can create a filter—such as the limit currently set at $10,000—before financial institutions could pass information on to FINTRAC. I am not an expert in this area, but I think it is entirely possible for the limit to be deemed unreasonable or to become meaningless because of how terrorists operate.

Finance committee  There is all kinds of review and oversight. There's review before the fact to authorize a certain government action, for instance, a court authorizing the issuing of a warrant. Review normally takes place after the fact. So it is an auditing system whereby one verifies whether or not the government activity was lawful.

Finance committee  The information I was referring to was uncovered in the course of our two-year review audits that we've conducted over the years. Essentially, the problems stem from the discretionary criteria applied by financial institutions and providing information to FINTRAC, namely, that a transaction appears suspicious.

Finance committee  I don't want to exaggerate the importance of the problem, but we did find occurrences of reporting by financial institutions to FINTRAC that appeared to be based in part on race, place of destination, and age.

Finance committee  To distinguish between the current laws as they apply to FINTRAC and Bill C-51, current laws, some of which are being revisited or reconsidered including the dollar threshold, to me are reasonable because reporting to FINTRAC is either on the basis of whether a transaction is suspicious.

Finance committee  On that point, I'm not sure about an international comparison, but in terms of oversight of national security agencies writ large, whether for terrorist financing or other activities, Canada certainly has a number of review bodies for the RCMP, for CSIS, and for the Security Establishment.

Finance committee  I guess my concern is that in gathering massive amounts of information to identify suspicious transactions, government receives, analyzes, and retains for long periods a lot of information about law-abiding citizens.

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for the invitation to address you today. The subject of your study, Canada's regime for combatting the financing of terrorism, is clearly a timely one. As you are aware, in light of Bill C-51 and other recent legislative activity, the past year has seen much public debate about the rules that regulate how information is collected, shared and analyzed by and among our law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

Industry committee  No, I would disagree with that. I think there is a fairly big difference between the proposed regime which would be authorizing organizations to share information for the purpose of investigating potential breaches versus the current regime where information can be shared only when an organization has reason to believe that there is a breach.

Industry committee  “Likely” refers to a potential breach, so a breach that in the eyes of the organization is likely to occur but has not yet been seen.