Government strengthens Canada’s anti-money laundering framework with new regulatory amendments

March 7, 2025 - Ottawa, Ontario - Department of Finance Canada

Today, the Government of Canada announced the upcoming implementation of new regulatory amendments to strengthen Canada’s Anti-Money Laundering and Anti-Terrorist Financing (AML/ATF) framework and ensure that it is even more robust and effective in addressing threats of financial crime.

The amendments will greatly improve efforts to combat money laundering and its link to transnational crime and drug trafficking, particularly fentanyl, and complement the Government of Canada’s Border Plan as well as the recently announced creation of a Canada-U.S. Joint Strike Force to combat organized crime and maintain the integrity of our shared border. The new regulatory measures will implement:

• Enhancements to the Canada Border Services Agency’s authorities in order to reinforce its ability to detect, deter, and disrupt trade-based financial crime;
• A new framework that will allow private institutions to share information related to money laundering, terrorist financing and sanctions evasion, to make it harder for criminals to access the financial system and evade detection;
• A requirement to report discrepancies between information provided to private institutions and the federal beneficial ownership registry maintained by Corporations Canada to support the accuracy and integrity of the new registry; and
• AML/ATF obligations for factoring companies, cheque cashing businesses, and financing and leasing companies to close a regulatory gap with financial services that criminals can exploit.

And starting April 1, 2025, provincial and territorial civil forfeiture offices will begin to receive financial intelligence disclosures from the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC), Canada’s financial intelligence unit, to support efforts to seize the assets of criminals. 

Further, the Minister of Finance and Intergovernmental Affairs will update Directives associated with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the Russian Federation. These updates will safeguard the integrity of Canada’s financial sector and combat potential sanctions evasion.

These measures build on the government’s investments of more than $379 million over the last five years to enhance the effectiveness of Canada’s AML/ATF Regime, by strengthening compliance, financial intelligence, information sharing, and investigative capacity to support money laundering investigations and combat sanctions evasion. This is in addition to legislative and regulatory changes that provide new tools to law enforcement, add new criminal offences and strengthen penalties, and expand the Regime to new sectors at risk of money laundering.

On February 19, 2025, the government convened the first working meeting of the new Integrated Money Laundering Intelligence Partnership. This new partnership will support the permissible sharing of money laundering and organized crime intelligence between law enforcement and Canada’s big banks.