About time to get a grip on money-laundering problems in Canada

It will be a complicated task to build an effective and harmonized database of beneficial ownership of federal and provincial/territorial corporate shareholdings, augmented to include real estate holdings, and publicly accessible to market stakeholders. But the effort will be worth it to strengthen integrity of capital markets and investor confidence.

Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, pictured Sept. 25, 2020. The federal government’s decision to break the inertia to move forward and build a beneficial ownership registry should be applauded, to increase corporate transparency and more effectively combat money-laundering activities, tax evasion and other illicit activities.The Hill Times photograph by Andrew Meade

Opinion

BY IAN C.W. RUSSELL

May 10, 2021

One of the pleasant surprises in the April federal budget was the announcement to earmark $2.1-million to build and implement a national corporate beneficial ownership registry. In December 2017, federal and provincial/territorial finance ministers had agreed in principle to pursue amendments to the...

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