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This puts lawyers above the law compared to other self-regulating professionals. Accountants, doctors, nurses, social workers or teachers are never exempt under the law from reporting abuse or criminality by their clients. This is foolishness.

Besides, the law societies are riven with conflicts and have done a lousy job. For instance, it took five years for the B.C. Law Society to suspend a lawyer for six months after he allowed $25 million in suspicious transactions to flow through his trust account.

Obviously, unregulated lawyers can enable laundering. And as an unregulated profession, they can sabotage Ottawa’s money laundering initiatives, including, notably, to make prosecutions easier and to provide beneficial ownership transparency, so that law enforcement agencies “can more clearly know who owns which corporations in Canada.”

Lawyers will continue to set up dummy corporations, and international structures, on behalf of persons unknown without question. And some will continue to “rent out” their trust funds to criminals and kleptocrats, bypassing reporting requirements that others must adhere to.

In 2016, this gap was emphasized by the world’s foremost watchdog, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) launched by the G7 and United Nations and yet nothing changed. The Task Force stated: “All high-risk areas (in Canada) are covered by … measures, except legal counsels, legal firms and Quebec notaries. This constitutes a significant loophole in Canada’s framework.”

“In light of these professionals’ key gatekeeper role, in particular in high-risk sectors and activities such as real-estate transactions and the formation of corporations and trusts, this constitutes a serious impediment to Canada’s efforts to fight money laundering (or terrorist financing),” stated the FATF.

Another priority for Ottawa should be enhancing enforcement and prosecutorial capabilities. Given the sheer scale of the problem, the fact that only a handful of indictments and convictions have occurred speaks for itself.

There’s no question that Canada is a laggard.