Canada has become a well-known target, even a magnet, for money laundering, and no wonder.
According to a report out today from the C.D. Howe Institute, a Canadian think-tank, 99.9 per cent of those money launderers are just never caught.
And as British Columbia begins to crack down on the washing of dirty money, the author of the new report, retired corporate lawyer Kevin Comeau, says failure to change national laws just means the crime will go elsewhere in the country.
“It’s highly unfair to law enforcement agencies to say that they’ve been ignoring it,” said Comeau, a member of Transparency International Canada’s working group on beneficial ownership transparency, in a telephone interview. “The problem is that they don’t have the tools to address it.”
Ironically, it is Canada’s reliable rule of law system that attracts the money launderers. Dirty money can come from crime anywhere in the world, including Canada. But much of it is funnelled out of poor countries and autocratic regimes.
But whether the source is drug crimes or political bribery and theft, the people who claim that money don’t want to keep it in those autocratic countries because a more powerful leader could simply take it.
Not so in liberal democracies like Canada where, once you have the legal right of ownership, the law firmly protects that right.
[…]
