Bill C-29 creates a dedicated federal agency – and in-house counsel should prepare now: Léon Moubayed
Canada is entering a new chapter in financial crime enforcement – and organizations that are not prepared may find themselves caught off guard when the Financial Crimes Agency begins operations.
That is the message from Léon Moubayed, a partner at Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg LLP and one of the country’s leading white-collar defence lawyers, following the federal government’s introduction of Bill C-29 on April 27, 2026. The bill establishes the Financial Crimes Agency (FCA), the most significant restructuring of Canada’s financial crime enforcement apparatus in a generation, and Moubayed says the implications for companies are immediate.
“We are at the dawn of a new enforcement era,” he says, pointing to a series of legislative changes the government has made in recent years – in money laundering law and now with this bill – as evidence that the enforcement environment is shifting decisively. For in-house counsel, Moubayed says, “it’s time to review the internal processes. It’s time to review the way things are being done. And it’s time now to make sure that everything is in place to ensure that integrity, the organization’s commitments and obligations towards integrity, are fully met.”
A fragmentation problem, finally addressed
For years, critics of Canada’s approach to financial crime enforcement have pointed to the same structural problem: too many agencies, too little coordination. The RCMP, FINTRAC, local police forces, the federal Crown, and provincial Crowns have each played a role, but no single entity has been clearly in charge. Moubayed says this fragmentation is one of the central reasons Canada has historically secured so few prosecutions in serious or complex financial crime matters. The FCA is designed to resolve this by ensuring “there’s one entity that is clearly in charge.”
Financial crimes are also more difficult to investigate than offences that leave physical evidence, he explains. Investigators are looking for fingerprints on a firearm or drugs hidden in a vehicle in conventional cases, but financial crime is different – “you’re looking at … documents produced sometimes in the normal course of business … trying to [find a] paper trail and trying to understand what happened.” Layered on top of that is the pace of technological change, with crypto assets and other emerging tools requiring investigators to stay constantly up to date.
He cautions that results will not be immediate – “the benefits may be behind the scenes, maybe a few months or years before we see the results of this coordination” – but the structural shift is significant.
Financial crime as a national security issue
Moubayed describes the FCA’s establishment as “a national security issue,” and says its role is explicitly “to protect the integrity of Canada’s economy.”
He points to foreign corruption as an illustration of why financial crime carries consequences well beyond the individuals involved. Bribery does not just benefit those who pay it – it weakens institutions, reduces public trust, diminishes services to citizens and distorts where economic investment flows. “The message that we’re sending as a country is that financial crime is a national issue,” he says.
That framing helps explain one of the bill’s more debated provisions: the fiat power, which allows the Attorney General of Canada to assert prosecutorial authority over financial crimes investigated by the Financial Crimes Agency, even where a province would otherwise have jurisdiction. Moubayed does not anticipate immediate constitutional challenges. The provision, he says, is “not going to be automatic. It’s going to be a matter of discretion” – most likely deployed in cases spanning multiple provinces, where a centralized prosecution offers clear advantages over a fragmented one.
What in-house counsel need to do now
For organizations operating in Canada, the arrival of the FCA is a practical trigger for action. Moubayed says in-house counsel should prioritize two things above all: robust compliance programs and the protection of privilege.
“Privilege is going to be always very, very important, especially when … they launch an investigation, … not knowing what they’re going to find at the outset,” he says. Having that protection in place before an investigation begins – rather than scrambling to establish it afterward – is essential to preserving the organization’s ability to make strategic decisions about cooperation and disclosure.
Moubayed also points to Canada’s long-underused remediation agreement regime as a tool that may gain new relevance under the FCA. Introduced into the Criminal Code in 2018, the regime has produced only two approved agreements – both in Quebec, in the SNC-Lavalin and Ultra Electronics Forensic Technology cases. In a recently published article in the Revue du Barreau, Moubayed and two colleagues at Davies examined the Canadian regime alongside approaches in the US, UK and France, arguing it has not come close to its potential. A key gap, they contend, is the absence of a self-reporting mechanism that provides organizations with a clearer pathway to negotiations in exchange for good-faith disclosure – something the UK’s Serious Fraud Office sought to address with new guidance published in April 2025.
With the FCA in place, Moubayed expects enforcement to intensify against both corporations and individuals. The Revue du Barreau article notes that both Canadian remediation agreement cases so far have resulted in charges against the individuals involved – a contrast with the US, where agreements have at times shielded executives. “The intent is to be more active … against those complex financial crimes that require … more tools, more resources, and much more coordination between agencies, experts and knowledge in order to investigate,” he says.
“In Canada, we have the laws, but we did not have the enforcement,” Moubayed says. “And the agency is meant to change that.”
