Information & Ethics committee  It may not pertain specifically to SCISA, but when it comes to FINTRAC, in fact, we were created to prevent law enforcement agencies from accessing directly the information of Canadians without a warrant or a production order. If you compare us, for instance, to other organizat

Information & Ethics committee  It's the same thing with FINTRAC. We haven't received or disclosed anything under SCISA.

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, for inviting Stéphane Cousineau and me, on behalf of FINTRAC, to speak with you regarding the committee's study of the Security of Canada Information Sharing Act. I can assure you that we will be as forthcoming as we can with our answers today; however, I k

Finance committee  We do receive different kinds of reports. One set of reports is the suspicious transaction reports. In the suspicious transaction reports, the bank or financial institution—it may be a bank, it may be a security dealer—would report, for instance, what they considered being suspic

Finance committee  Potential, suspicion of, and then CRA will continue its own investigation based on their own criteria.

Finance committee  The legislation allows us to report to a series of enforcement agencies, as you said, the RCMP, CBSA, CRA, CSIS, and also local police forces if it's relevant to them, as long as there is a requirement to disclose the information. For instance, if it is about terrorist financing

Finance committee  We receive 20 million reports in total. This not only includes international funds transfers, but all sorts of other reports.

Finance committee  I cannot confirm an amount. However, we could check that. I can tell you, however, that over the past few years, the number of transfers to Syria has almost fallen to zero. The amounts destined to Syria were minimal, by the way. Since we have 225 million reports in our database,

Finance committee  Yes, but they are, among others, transfers to humanitarian organizations, since humanitarian aid is indeed provided to Turkey.

Finance committee  Not necessarily. This may have been done at the strategic level, but for our part, we follow individual transfers, that is to say transactions between individuals or entities, if companies are involved. Consequently, the analysis grid is designed based on a certain number of fac

Finance committee  That is possible, but the transaction itself does not show that.

Finance committee  These are reports concerning the individual and the amount. The final destination is not known. Even if a person leaves Canada to go to the United States, it is possible that he or she may then go to many other places in the world. It is impossible—at least for us—to know the tra

Finance committee  Since we see only transaction reports, we see of course who is transacting money but it is impossible just by looking at transactions to identify whether a transaction is illegitimate or legitimate. That's always a bit of the challenge we face when we're being asked if we track t

Finance committee  Absolutely. In fact FINTRAC, for instance, is a full member of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, so we sit at the table when they identify their priorities and their operations.

Finance committee  Mr. Chair, that's an issue that is outside the purview of my mandate, but I will just repeat that we in fact have at FINTRAC all the powers we need in order to receive and disclose the information that is relevant.