If You Want Something to Go Right, Don't Get the Government Involved

Cases in point:

Among all of the ideas to support affordable homes, three parties — the Conservative Party, the Liberal Party and the New Democratic Party — have committed to addressing the problem of money laundering in the Canadian housing market. One of the solutions that has been put on the table is the creation of a beneficial ownership registry.

The registry would require companies, trusts and partnerships to publicly disclose controlling shareholders, beneficial owners and partners so everyone would know who purchased a property.

Ontario realtors have been fighting to get dirty money out of Canadian real estate and we are pleased to see growing momentum behind a beneficial registry. It would allow law enforcement, tax authorities, media and everyday citizens to search for properties of corrupt officials, their families or people they may know who are involved in money-laundering crimes, and better connect money from criminal acts overseas to property purchased in Canada.

Currently, weak corporate transparency rules in Canada allow criminals to hide behind anonymous shell companies and wash large amounts of money through housing. That’s because shell companies are permitted to buy homes without disclosing the names of the beneficial owners  —those who enjoy the benefits of ownership even though the title of the property is in someone else’s name.

According to a recent report by Transparency International Canada, more than $28.4 billion worth of residential properties in the Greater Toronto Area have been purchased by shell companies since 2008. The problem is we don’t know how much of this money comes from legitimate businesses and how much are anonymous front companies hiding laundered money.

What we do know is the dirty money coming into our housing market is competing against hard-working young families trying to buy homes — and that has to stop.

First of all, if people were allowed to keep their money, the government would not siphon money from taxpayers and then dole it out back to them in bits and pieces.

Secondly, corruption and laxness have allowed everything from criminal parties to hide their ill-gotten gains behind properties to the recent SNC-Lavalin scandal. Why trust a broken system to fix what the government likely benefits from?




Where is Greta Thunberg on this?:

Quebec Premier François Legault says the province is planning to change how it tests drinking water for lead in response to an investigative report published on Wednesday by Global News, which revealed that the province is using sampling methods that don’t accurately measure the true levels of exposure.

I'll just leave this right here:

Environmentalists are outraged by a "preposterous" large sewage dump into the St. Lawrence River near Montreal and a "staggering" number of smaller, chronic sewage overflows throughout the year in Quebec.

Of course Canada can build anything from steel. It just won't:

Though the LNG consortium requested an exclusion, arguing the modules they needed couldn’t be made in Canada, the CITT refused. The LNG companies then requested a judicial review by the Federal Court of Appeals.

But, in a highly unusual move, Ottawa stepped in. In a surprise announcement in August, Finance Minister Bill Morneau granted full duty remissions on the components for both the LNG Canada and Woodfibre LNG projects.

“Trade barriers would not be permitted to stand in the way of these historic private-sector investments,” the government said in a release at the time.

For long-time Canadian trade lawyer Cyndee Todgham Cherniak, the government’s decision to override its top trade court — and refer to its duties as “barriers” — was shocking.

“It really was a bizarre, bizarre move by the Department of Finance,” said Todgham Cherniak, of LexSage Professional Corp. “I’ve never seen them do it, ever. They are overriding the CITT decision that is currently before the Federal Court of Appeal in a judicial review. Shouldn’t the legal process run its course?”

Todgham Cherniak, who represented LaFarge Canada Inc. in arguing that the CITT had erred in its finding, believes the tribunal should not have sided with the fabricators’ argument that they could make the modules.

“We don’t have the capability to build these larger modules in Canada; it’s not the Chinese circumventing the system,” she said. “At the end of the day, if you aren’t making them now, you don’t have the capability. You can try, but which lucky company gets to be the guinea pig when you fail?

Or people outsource because they believe it is cheaper.




Do you mean that no one was watching him?:

In fact, some members of the force, while not disputing the importance of “civilianization” and bringing in people with diverse skills and perspectives, had cast a wary eye on the activities of Ortis and his colleagues, concerned about all the information they had access to, what they were doing with it and whether there was sufficient oversight.

“The sense was they were off doing their thing without too much supervision, almost carte blanche to go off and do whatever. They seemed to be operating outside of the normal scope, the normal structure,” one former senior official told the National Post.

“They came across as cowboys.”

The question of oversight is now front and centre after Ortis, 47, was accused last month of violating Canada’s secrecy laws dating back to 2015. He was charged under the Security of Information Act with communicating special operational information and gathering information in order to share it with an unnamed foreign entity or terrorist group. He also faces charges under the Criminal Code, including breach of trust.