The Air India Commission, inquiring the 1985 Kanishka bombing that claimed 329 lives, has pulled up the federal government for its inability to provide basic information about how terrorist financing legislation is working in the country.
Justice John Major, who heads the inquiry, said on Wednesday his staff has had to do its own research to find out the extent of the terrorist financing in Canada and what is being done to combat the problem.
Major said the government agency monitoring the problem, FinTRAC, and other federal bodies have not been forthcoming about their knowledge on the issue to the inquiry.
"The whole theme of this has been the lack of response from almost every agency that came before us," Major said.
"They said they would supply the information and then it was going into what this report describes as a 'deep hole'."
Over the last two weeks, the inquiry has heard that despite identifying tens of millions in terrorist transactions in Canada every year, there has been no successful criminal prosecution.
Moreover, agencies mandated with investigating terrorist financing have complained about lack of coordination between them.
The judge reacted sharply to the statement of Department of Justice lawyer Kathryn Hucal who told the inquiry that FinTRAC was, in fact, doing lots of outreach to help banks and other reporting agencies understand how to identify terrorist financing in their institutions.
"Outreach is such a euphemism - for what? What do they do that is useful?" Major asked. "If you have information in your department that can shed light on this I think there is some obligation that you call it the outreach," he said.
If there is information in your department, you have been awfully silent about making it available to us," Major told the lawyer.
He said the government has done a poor job of aiding him in investigating the problem so he can make recommendations.
"We are spinning our wheels. We all know that there is efficiency in gathering information. There seems to be inefficiency in enforcement. There is efficiency in demanding information. There is inefficiency in responding to the information. It is a truck that isn't running," Major observed.
The inquiry had commissioned former RCMP investigator Brian Tario, who now works for Deloitte, to survey institutions required to report suspicious transaction to FinTRAC to know their views on whether enough is being done to combat terrorist financing.
Tario found that most did not get enough feedback from FinTRAC and believed it was like "a big black hole".
He said the 42 survey participants lacked understanding on the difference between anti-money laundering and terrorist financing.
"This is based on a lack of understanding of how terrorist organisations finance their operations," he said in his report.
"Those interviewed would like to see more feedback from FinTRAC in terms of whether or not their reporting is assisting, useful and is of a benefit based on the time, effort, energy and cost that each institution expends to comply with the legislation," the report stated.
