Dirty money likes Canada, and, even more disturbing, Canada appears to like dirty money.
How else to explain political foot-dragging in requiring transparency of beneficial ownership for corporations and trusts in this country? A recently published C.D. Howe Institute commentary on the issue does an admirable job of airing Canada’s dirty money details.
Denis Meunier’s Hidden Beneficial Ownership and Control: Canada as a Pawn in the Global Game of Money Laundering notes, for example, that estimates of money laundering in Canada range anywhere from $5 billion to $100 billion.
With its roots in drug trafficking, political corruption, kickbacks, payoffs, tax evasion and smuggling, dirty money is a dirty business from start to finish. Helping it assimilate into the mainstream economy is as bad as the crimes from which it originates. Key to that assimilation, as Meunier points out, is the creation of legal arrangements that hide the beneficial owners of corporations, partnerships and trusts.
Anonymity masks the players behind the system that corrupts business and politics the world over. And Canada, which, according to Meunier’s commentary, “fares poorly on international standards for disclosing beneficial ownership,” is part of that system. At best, that ranking is borne of political inertia; at worst, it is tacit approval of the rot at the heart of dirty money. That slipshod oversight in Canada’s corporate registration system, writes Meunier, “paints Canada as an international laggard and as a financial-secrecy jurisdiction.”
So initiatives like the Union of British Columbia Municipalities’ push to require land ownership transparency in B.C. need support from citizens and senior levels of government.
But as with this country’s inability to establish a national securities regulator and a national securities enforcement entity to prosecute and punish stock swindlers, its inaction on instituting beneficial ownership transparency confirms its minor-league status in global financial circles.
