Finance committee  Mr. Chair, the member is correct that we would have started the preregistration process, but within a week there's only so much that can be done by way of registration. At the preregistration stage, anybody who or any platform or any payment service provider who pre-registered wo

Finance committee  No, that is absolutely correct. FINTRAC was not involved at all. The point was simply that once the funds were frozen in the financial institutions, there would be no transactions to report to FINTRAC. There would be no transactions through those bank accounts, because the accoun

Finance committee  I do like to think that we learn all the time, but I'm not sure we've had enough time to really dig in deeply to see either the best way or the value of the reports that would come from crowdfunding platforms, for example. We anticipate that there would be, and we anticipate cont

Finance committee  It's correct for the crowdsourcing. They are not considered reporting entities. Crypto dealers, however, virtual currency dealers, are in fact registered with FINTRAC. They have been reporting to us since 2020.

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'd like to start by acknowledging the statements of the members on the situation in Ukraine. I want to thank you, Mr. Chair, for inviting FINTRAC to participate in your review of the Emergencies Act, which was revoked by the federal government yesterday

Public Safety committee  I think it's always good to ask the question and to do an in-depth study, once you're out of a crisis, to determine whether or not there are policy gaps that could be looked at and what is the best way to address those. From my perspective right now, in the situation that you me

Public Safety committee  That would not be, certainly, a role that FINTRAC plays. As I mentioned, we can neither investigate nor seize or freeze funds, nor do we ask any financial institution to delay a financial transaction. The recourse would be with their own financial institution, if in fact their f

Public Safety committee  No. Our guidelines are more along the lines of what they need to report to us and how to report, not how to manage their own risk and risk determination, nor how they manage the accounts of their clients.

Public Safety committee  Thank you for the question. As I was saying earlier, the situation we are currently experiencing is truly unique. We do not consider crowdfunding platforms to be tools that could be used to launder money or finance terrorist activities. There is always a risk that someone can us

Public Safety committee  You're right. In Canada, there are suspicious transaction reports. The SARs are in the U.S. I believe it's a combination of both. It's not necessarily that we have an explosion of criminality. [Technical difficulty—Editor] and better at identifying predicate crimes associated wi

Public Safety committee  What's happening in Ottawa has not been, to my knowledge, identified as ideologically motivated violent extremism. [Technical difficulty—Editor] might come into Canada to support ideologically motivated violent extremism, and the United States would be extremely concerned about m

Public Safety committee  No. In terms of the sources of funding that we've seen to date, as you know I can't speak to specific reporting or reporting on any individuals or organizations, but we have not seen a spike in suspicious transaction reporting, for example, related to this.

Public Safety committee  Yes, we do open-source intelligence in support of the disclosures that we produce. We will provide that with the disclosures if it's relevant.

Public Safety committee  That is correct, sir.

Public Safety committee  They do have clear guidelines. The guidelines are available, and on our website we provide guidelines. We identify, as well, different reasons for submitting STRs and we provide those guidelines. We also provide a number of very specific indicators that would help them in their