Pulling the Plug on Money Laundering in British Columbia, Canada: lessons learned, and actions required

The Hon. Roy Cullen

doi:10.5281/zenodo.8090802

Journal of Academics Stand Against Poverty

Academics Stand Against Poverty

Journal of Academics Stand Against Poverty (Journal of ASAP) is an open access international multidisciplinary journal published under the ISSN 2690-3458 (electronic edition) and ISSN 2690-3431 (print edition) by Academics Stand Against Poverty, a non-profit organization based in United States (EIN # 32-0324998). Its mission is to publish high-quality work that can make genuine contributions to understanding and eradicating poverty and its effects in the real world. Such work will address the structural causes of poverty with an eye to the special challenges poor people face in such areas as nutrition, water, shelter, health and health care, sanitation, clothing and personal care, energy, education, social and political participation and respect, physical safety, family planning, environmental degradations and hazards, working conditions in employment and at home, navigating governmental agencies and the legal system, banking and credit, travel and transportation, and communications. Journal ASAP is committed to ensuring that perspectives of the poor are adequately represented on its pages, and that these pages are accessible to all. The journal makes substantial efforts to include voices from the global South as well as from non-elite educational institutions and from organizations, agencies and communities that are working toward poverty eradication. It also aims for the widest possible reach by being entirely open-access: its one/two issues each year are free for download anywhere in the world without any requirement to provide personal information. Journal ASAP invites submission of original work and maintains a rigorous double-blind peer review system that provides constructive feedback to assist authors in presenting their work in a way that is clear, broadly accessible and practically useful. Journal ASAP is a pure Open Access Journal and allows the author to retain the copyright in their articles. Articles are made available under a Creative Commons licence (CC-BY) to allow others to freely access, copy and use research provided the author is correctly attributed.

While Canada has never been immune to money laundering, something began to change in 2015 when vast amounts of dirty money started to surface in British Columbia's casinos. Two reports released by the provincial government in early May 2019 revealed that more than $7 billion had been laundered in British Columbia in 2018, including an estimated $5.3 billion through the real estate market. In response to these reports a public inquiry was convened to examine the full scope of money laundering in the province. In this essay, the author draws on his experience as a Canadian Member of Parliament, a former parliamentary secretary to Canada’s Minister of Finance and an active leader with the Global Organization of Parliamentarians Against Corruption (GOPAC) to examine how Canada arrived at this point and what can be done to turn the tide.

Journal of Academics Stand Against Poverty

Journal of Academics Stand Against Poverty

Pulling the Plug on Money Laundering in British Columbia, Canada: lessons learned, and actions required

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