Canada is moving to create a powerful new law enforcement agency dedicated to investigating and prosecuting financial crime, a step that places Ottawa on a sharply different course from Washington, where the Trump administration has scaled back federal fraud enforcement. 

A bill to establish the Financial Crimes Agency (FCA) completed its first reading in parliament this week, according to new reporting by The Guardian. The legislation was introduced by the governing Liberals, whose parliamentary majority is expected to move the measure through both chambers quickly.

The plans follow a public inquiry that concluded Canada lacked a cohesive strategy against money laundering and had fallen behind its international peers, the newspaper said. Alongside the FCA, Ottawa plans to ban cryptocurrency ATMs, which officials say have been used to defraud victims and to launder criminal proceeds. Canada hosts nearly 4,000 such machines, the most per capita in the world, the report said.

For more than 25 years, the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre (Fintrac) has served as Canada’s financial intelligence unit. The agency last year flagged C$45bn in transactions tied to money laundering, terrorist financing, sanctions evasion, and related disclosures, but itself has no power to arrest criminals and can only refer cases to police and prosecutors, The Guardian said. 

Under the new legislation, the FCA will both investigate and prosecute cases, a shift that narrows the mandates of Fintrac and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), the country’s federal law enforcement authority, according to the report. 

“The fact we’re actually seeing the creation [of a] new enforcement agency is a meaningful investment and hopefully signals the understanding of the seriousness of the challenge,” Jessica Davis, a former intelligence analyst with Canada’s spy agency told The Guardian.

Davis said the RCMP had struggled with sustained financial-crime investigations because of “a lack of funding, a lack of skills, lack of resources, and a lack of political will.” She told the newspaper that Fintrac’s annual figure “could be too high or far too low. We just don’t fully know the scope of financial crime in this country.”

The Canadian move stands in contrast to recent U.S. policy, The Guardian said. President Donald Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the founder of cryptocurrency exchange Binance, after he pleaded guilty to money laundering charges and his company had been ordered to pay a record $4.3bn penalty over its role in facilitating terrorist financing, the newspaper noted. 

In a January letter to federal watchdogs cited by The Guardian, senior Democrats called for an investigation into Trump’s decision to shift more than 25,000 personnel away from probing fraud, tax evasion, and money laundering, and toward immigration enforcement.