“There are a number of people, myself included, who have unanswered questions about how things got as bad as they did, what warnings were ignored, who was profiting from these systems, how did they work exactly and are there other steps the government should be taking,” Eby said in an interview.Inquiry hearings led by commissioner Austin Cullen begin Monday with opening arguments from more than a dozen participants, including the federal government, B.C. Lottery Corp. and B.C.
“I watched many of my clients, who were badly addicted to drugs and mentally ill, scraping together money to buy drugs,” he said. “I knew the money was going somewhere and it was a lot of money.” With a provincial election expected next year, it’s fair to ask whether the inquiry is in part political, given that the reports commissioned by the NDP have indicated money laundering worsened under the B.C. Liberals’ watch between 2009 and 2015.Eby argued that most B.C. residents already know the previous government, at best, turned a blind eye, and at worst, recognized dirty money was generating revenue, dismantled a police unit responsible for the problem and increased betting limits.
As for the federal government, Eby said on some fronts it has made good progress, including rewriting some Criminal Code sections to make it easier to prosecute money laundering and improving some information sharing from Fintrac, the Financial Transaction and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada. Blair’s office said his government, in contrast, earmarked over $172 million in the 2019 budget for the RCMP, CRA and Fintrac and announced the forthcoming creation of both an enforcement team and a Centre of Excellence.Peter German, a former senior Mountie who wrote two of the three reports that helped expose the problem in B.C., said his work was not a fault-finding exercise, so if the inquiry wants to hold people accountable it can use its powers of subpoena to do so.
Inquiries are sometimes criticized as too costly and lengthy, but Simon Tremblay, a former prosecutor on the Charbonneau Commission, said the probe into corruption in public construction contracts was the best investment Quebec ever made.
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