B.C.’s first-in-Canada registry for people who obscure their ownership of real estate is removing its $8 search fee in a bid to make it easier for law enforcement agencies, regulators, academics and journalists to uncover money laundering and tax evasion.
Finance Minister Katrine Conroy’s office said Friday it made the decision to make all searches of the Land Owner Transparency Registry free come April 1 after pushback from journalists and other professionals frustrated by the prohibitive cost of plumbing this database, which became searchable in the spring of 2021 and fully populated last year.
“Through the registry, we’re shining a light on hidden property ownership and money laundering in the housing market, and now we’re strengthening that work to detect and fight tax evasion, money laundering and other criminal activity in B.C.,” Ms. Conroy said in a news release.
Most pieces of land in the province are owned straightforwardly by individuals whose names are listed in public records. But provincial law forces thousands of people buying a property or signing a lease longer than a decade to file a report declaring if they have hidden – or “beneficial” – partners in the deal. Corporations, trusts and partnerships also have to disclose the true identities of their ownership group to the registry.
Former RCMP deputy commissioner Peter German, whose twin reports for the NDP government on West Coast money laundering precipitated the three-year Cullen Commission, welcomed the cancellation of search fees.
“It is well known that sunlight, in the form of transparency in government, is the best antidote to corruption,” said Mr. German, a lawyer and anti-money-laundering consultant who chairs the Vancouver Anti-Corruption Institute. “It is essential that journalists and investigators have the greatest possible access to public documents.”
Sasha Caldera, the Toronto-based beneficial ownership campaign manager for Publish What You Pay Canada, a non-profit advocacy group fighting corruption in Canada’s natural resources sector, also heralded the policy shift he has long recommended as a key way to bring in “more eyes” to analyze the data and make the registry truly effective.
“There’s going to be whistle-blowers from around the world who might have word within their own countries that someone is buying up property in B.C. with stolen tax money and they’d be able to access this registry and see if that’s true,” he said.
The New Democrats announced plans for the registry with their first full budget in 2018 after forming a minority government the previous summer. Two years prior, then-opposition MLA David Eby obtained the land titles and corporate filings that informed an explosive report from Transparency International Canada, which found that nearly half of the 100 most expensive homes in Vancouver and on its North Shore were held by legal structures, often shell companies, that hid the names of their actual owners.
Excluding bulk searches of the database by certain law enforcement agencies with greater access, there have been nearly 29,000 searches of the registry from its inception to the start of this month, according to Grace Battiston, spokesperson for the Land Title and Survey Authority of B.C., which oversees the registry.
The provincial Ministry of Finance said an enforcement officer has now been appointed to police the rules of the registry. But spokespeople could not provide data on whether there has been any enforcement against those who have failed to disclose their hidden property ownership, which can mean a $25,000 fine for an individual, or $50,000 for a corporation – or, in either case, 5 per cent of the assessed value of the property, whichever is greater.
Ms. Battiston deferred to the Ministry of Finance on whether there has been any enforcement against those who have failed to disclose their hidden property ownership, which can mean a $25,000 fine for an individual, or $50,000 for a corporation – or, in either case, 5 per cent of the assessed value of the property, whichever is greater.
Mike Hager