VANCOUVER—Federal Finance Minister Bill Morneau announced another chunk of money for police to fight money laundering, and said he and the provinces reaffirmed a commitment to peel back secrecy in corporate ownership.

The federal government will commit an additional $10 million to the RCMP on top of $163 million already committed to fight money laundering and announced in the 2019 federal budget.

“Canadians know that it’s just unacceptable that we have criminals who are able to move money in and out of our society, possibly causing rising real estate prices, or issues around criminals being able to do something as nefarious as being involved in gang activity or, in global terms, there’s worry around terrorism,” Morneau said following a meeting of federal and provincial officials in Vancouver on Thursday.

British Columbia Attorney General David Eby welcomed the funding, which comes after he blasted the federal government earlier this year when he learned not a single federal RCMP officer was working on money laundering prosecutions in B.C.

Eby said there was a gap between FINTRAC, Canada’s financial intelligence agency, which collects information on suspicious transactions, and police, who lacked resources to review and act on the reports.

“In B.C. we know FINTRAC reports were being collected, but who was looking at them?” Eby asked.

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A series of explosive reports have revealed widespread money laundering in provincial casinos, and money-laundering opportunities in the real estate and luxury car sectors.

The province recently passed legislation to create a land ownership registry to show the true owners of property in B.C. Up until now, landowners have been able to keep their identity secret by using corporations, trusts and offshore companies to hold real estate.

Eby and B.C. Finance Minister Carole James have been urging other provinces to create similar registries, and want the federal government to lead the effort.

Doug Downey, parliamentary assistant to Ontario’s Finance Minister, said the province already has a robust system to track beneficial ownership of property, share information with federal law enforcement and flag suspicious transactions.

In Ontario, property owners must register a land-transfer tax affidavit when they register a property. That affidavit identifies the true owner of the property, and it’s publicly available as part of the property record.

“If a company makes a series of transactions where the profit was over $100,000 in a short period of time, a red flag goes off and then we look into it,” he said.

In its 2019 budget, Quebec pledged to start consultation work to create a corporate registry of beneficial ownership.

Ottawa has already amended the Canada Business Corporations Act to require companies to disclose who owns them to shareholders and creditors, but the information is not public and the federal government has no immediate plan to create a public registry.

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Money laundering experts in Canada have routinely called for a public registry of beneficial ownership, like the one the United Kingdom created in 2016.

Currently, police and regulators can’t even access information about who owns federally registered companies, but Morneau indicated that might change.

“We know that not only is it important to have the information, but law enforcement agencies need to be able to actually access it,” he said.

“There are very real issues around privacy, there are very real issues around the burden of regulation on corporations that we need to think about.”

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