Finance committee  Yes, definitely. There is a famous expression, I think by Will Rogers, which says that you might be on the right track, but if you don't start moving, you're going to get run over. What we had was a model from the 1950s with the RCMP out west. The western provinces at that time

Finance committee  Clearly you have multiple options. When they had the Colombians going strongly in terms of the cocaine trade, they were obviously anxious to look for ways to move their money out because they had warehouses filled with dollar-bill equivalents rotting. They looked for new technolo

Finance committee  You mentioned the FBI and I think that's a classic example. When you see the large stock frauds that are going on with insider trading, we're talking billions and billions of dollars. The Americans take that task upon them and they can do it because they have higher skill levels

Finance committee  I think it is a complex structural problem. One is one boss, one task as opposed to multiple tasks in the case of the RCMP. It's clearly skill sets and recruitment for it. My friend here referred to the CSE. They'd be a world rival obviously in their ability to collect data and

Finance committee  Since the 1950s, we've found ourselves in a model of government contracts with various provinces to provide policing at the municipal and federal levels. If it's a small community, there's a different formula. It could be up to 30% where the federal government subsidizes the prov

Finance committee  I think we're at that point and we've gone there because crime has changed. By the way, I have also chaired the National Coordinating Committee on Organized Crime for five years and the Canada-U.S. Crime Forum for five years, and it was obvious that the type of crime that societ

Finance committee  Oh, yes, that is my complaint. Since this is a finance committee, I assume you have financial backgrounds. If you conceived a company to produce a product and viewed all this information as streams of ingredients for a product going down to a cook, the ingredients all come in,

Finance committee  That was the whole purpose for the creation of FINTRAC here in Canada. There's an obligation upon banks and these financial institutions proactively to look at, in this case, transactions of $10,000 or more, and for various criteria in those training programs put in place. When t

Finance committee  There are agreements between FINTRAC and other—

Finance committee  It has agreements with similar bodies in other countries and they exchange information back and forth. Yes, there is that collaboration, and it is networked so that we might get a heads-up from another government that something is happening that impacts us, and then that is sha

Finance committee  I'll give you some background. I prosecuted complex drug cases, tons of materials. We didn't have the laws in place to seize the proceeds so I advocated that. For five years, I actually ran the proceeds of crime and money laundering program at the Department of Justice, and I led

Finance committee  Well, that's the problem. When I have looked at the file, I can't find any files. There's one little Hamas-connected thing. I also led the initiative for the charities. That worked, because we didn't want the government financing terrorists through tax receipts. You look at a lo

Finance committee  Thank you. I agree with the principle that access to money is a necessary ingredient of one's ability to conduct criminal and terrorist activity. Denying individuals such access will reduce the harm to society. Ongoing efforts to strengthen and modernize the legislation are nec

Public Safety committee  It certainly doesn't put a lot of confidence in the ability of the commission to manage its workload. The matter that captures my attention and that is important, for instance, is what I would call a chair-initiated investigation. I'll give you an example. I get a taser complai

Public Safety committee  At one time I said facetiously, but maybe colourfully too, so you're allowed to smile if I say it, that this looks like the model of the horse that has decided what saddle it wants to wear. In this case, the RCMP is the horse. This is very user-friendly for the RCMP, but it is no