Finance committee  Thank you.

Finance committee  That's a good question. In the cryptocurrency, digital asset space at the moment, the answer is probably not. There is a lot of work we could all do together to improve that. There is a tendency for governments to go to the largest player—the big banks—when they are trying to set policy.

Finance committee  That's correct.

Finance committee  Blair made an excellent point earlier about a lot of the illicit flow of funds, the majority of which is in the traditional banking sector. The market cap of cryptocurrency does not really allow for the volume of flow that you'd need to hide. It would be very visible and transparent because of the transparency of the blockchain and because of the fact that it's a public ledger.

Finance committee  You can take the first pass at it.

Finance committee  I could maybe speak on two and then pass it over. Again these suggestions are a little bit off the cuff because I wasn't totally prepared for that question. One thing that we've seen work very well in jurisdictions like Switzerland, Wyoming and other places in the world is creating a special class of banking licence that allows not just crypto companies but also fintechs to access payment networks and payment rails.

Finance committee  I will say that the provinces are more coordinated than the states are at the moment, which is one benefit.

Finance committee  It's also very important—I'm sorry.

Finance committee  I was going to say I think it's very important—and this applies to various FINTRAC rules—that we often have an obligation not to inform the customer. It's called the “no tipping rule”. We do not tip them off if there is an active investigation. Sometimes it doesn't involve our freezing their accounts, but when it did, the lack of clear process from the client's point of view would be very difficult to handle, especially if they were, perhaps, not named appropriately.

Finance committee  I can handle that one first, and Blair can jump in. For us, we reviewed our client base against the list that we received. I'd have to double-check this, but I don't believe that there was anyone in our client list who actually matched. We obviously blocked some transfers from the list of the client addresses that were given by the RCMP, but that was the extent of it.

Finance committee  I can probably speak to that—

Finance committee  Oh, sorry, Brian.

Finance committee  We're fairly fortunate at this point because we're large enough that we represent significant business for the credit unions and banks we work with. One of them is actually on the east coast, Credit Union Atlantic. It was bold enough to work with us in 2019 and it took the risk.

Finance committee  I was just going to say that on some of the benefits, some of the nuance is that, for example, it gives the ability to dissidents to be able to get access to funding for journalists abroad. There is a very nuanced discussion around how to enable the good applications and minimize the bad.

Finance committee  Some of the good applications—