Reported by Minister of Finance and National Revenue – Canada

(Summary featured below. To read full report, go to: https://budget.canada.ca/2025/report-rapport/pdf/budget-2025.pdf)

Canada’s 2025 budget marks one of the most sweeping crackdowns on money laundering and financial crime the country has ever announced. The move comes after years of criticism that Canada was too easily exploited by transnational crime networks, real estate laundromats, fentanyl traffickers, and professional facilitators. The government is now signaling that those days are over, and it’s backing that message with funding, legislation, and new enforcement architecture.

One of the centerpiece steps is the creation of a new national Financial Crimes Agency designed to lead investigations into complex money laundering, organized criminal finance, online fraud, and sanctions evasion schemes. This agency will unite police and civilian investigative expertise into a single enforcement hub.  The goal is to replicate the sophistication of the criminal networks Canada is trying to disrupt, rather than leaving enforcement spread across multiple agencies with limited coordination.

The budget also allocates $1.7 billion to strengthen RCMP capacity to target money laundering, transnational crime, and criminal intelligence operations, including hiring 1,000 new federal policing personnel.  This acknowledges a long-standing challenge: Canada’s enforcement bodies have historically been under-resourced compared to the scale and complexity of global illicit finance entering the country.

On the regulatory side, the government is tightening cash-based laundering loopholes by restricting cash transactions of $10,000 or more and banning cash deposited into another person’s account, targeting smurfing and underground banking schemes.  It is also enhancing public-private intelligence sharing through the Integrated Money Laundering Intelligence Partnership (IMLIP) to improve coordination between banks and law enforcement.  And to strengthen regulatory alignment, FINTRAC will now join the Financial Institutions Supervisory Committee, improving supervisory data sharing across Canada’s financial oversight system. 

Finally, the government is expanding AML coverage by formally bringing mortgage lenders, brokers, and administrators under PCMLTFA obligations.  This targets real estate, which has been identified as one of the most exploited channels for illicit finance. Taken together, the measures indicate a strategic shift toward an intelligence-driven, enforcement-led approach—more aggressive, more coordinated, and more difficult for financial crime networks to evade.