British Columbia is a hub for money laundering, and Canada's lax regulations allow billions of dollars to flow illegally into the province, according to the findings of a three-year public inquiry.

The inquiry concluded that such concentration of activity had a significant impact on the BC economy.

The three-year inquiry resulted in a report was delivered by the public inquiry's lead commissioner, BC Supreme Court Justice Austin Cullen, which is more than 1,800 pages long and includes 101 recommendations for overhauling large swaths of the BC economy and regulatory environment.

The public inquiry heard from nearly 200 witnesses between 2020 and 2021, not to mention a notable contingent of experts on global money laundering schemes.

Cullen assures that failures in law enforcement and government policy have resulted in a "staggering" increase in money laundering in the province. During the proceedings, the "Vancouver model" for laundering was particularly scrutinized.

Organized crime groups use the internationally infamous money laundering framework to deposit their ill-gotten cash through an underground informal value transfer system operating in southern BC's Lower Mainland region. 

After depositing the cash, the criminals get a token of equivalent value – often casino chips, real estate, or luxury goods – which is then routed through the global laundering network.

"The problem is that the majority, if not all, of the actual cash provided to those individuals in British Columbia is derived from profit-oriented criminal activity and is paid out by the operator of the informal value transfer system in furtherance of a money laundering scheme," Cullen wrote.

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