Thank you very much, Mr. Blaikie.

First of all, what we think would be the immediate next step is for stakeholder consultations to occur with industry, civil society, journalists and international civil society. These consultations can be stretched out over the summer, and they should be conducted in a very transparent manner.

If it's possible, have these consultations in front of committee, where all stakeholders can submit their views and perspectives on the record and talk about what they want to see in a registry publicly. That is ideal, because the very nature of this tool is to utilize transparency as a way to deter the proceeds of crime from entering our economy, and we think a transparent consultation would be very important and consistent with that goal.

The next step would be for the federal government to convene provinces and territories through the regular finance ministers' meetings, say that we are going ahead with a centralized, publicly accessible registry and reach out to provinces and form a coalition of the willing. This way, we think there will be many early-adopter provinces that would be interested in joining.

We note that the Province of Quebec has already made a commitment to make its beneficial ownership information public and searchable in its own registry. British Columbia has done the same with properties, and the Atlantic Canada provinces I think will be very much enthusiastic supporters, simply because they might not have the capacity to do this kind of upgrading. The agreement and the framework for a pan-Canadian registry can be achieved through the federal-provincial-territorial meetings that regularly occur.

After consultations, we think that all of this should be packaged into the next budget implementation act and, as a whole, swiftly passed before the end of the year.

Those three steps I think will set up Canada to meet that 2023 target.

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