Welcome back to the podcast, bribe, swindle, or steel.

I'm Alexandra Rogge, and my guest today is Mark Morrison.

Mark is the National Practice Group leader of Blake's Business Crimes, Investigations, and Compliance Group.

He's one of the leading white-collar lawyers in Canada with a

particular focus on anti-corruption, and we're speaking today about Canada's performance as a

signatory to the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention and what the new recommendation came out in November

might mean for Canada. Thank you for joining me, Mark. Thanks very much for having me, Alexander.

Can you provide a bit of background on Canada's accession to the convention and just

your understanding as a practitioner in Canada on how our reputation has evolved in this respect?

Canada's had an interesting track record from the time it signed the OECD

convention in 1997. And by interesting, I mean, very boring for the first several years.

Canada has been, I think it's safe to say, especially compared to other countries such as the

U.S. most obviously. Canada has been very slow off the mark, slow to get going.

We've done for various presentations along the way, these various sort of time charts or

chronologies.

And you see for really between, well, 1999 was when Canada enacted the CFPOA.

And then really for approximately the next nine to 10 years, there was

almost nothing. There was a small $25,000 conviction of a company called Hydro Clean in 2005,

which ironically, I don't want to get too far off topic, but the backstory of that was the company

actually was charged with a criminal code offense

and the CFPOA offense and nobody had ever heard of the CFPOA at that time. So it was actually

a plea bargain to something they thought was less serious. In any event, really, for that first

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