The Globe and Mail reports in its Friday edition that it is well known that Canada is a soft touch on money laundering. The Globe's Rita Trichur writes that against that backdrop, it was surprising to learn that Ottawa was the setting for the first-ever financial crime symposium jointly hosted by the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada. This inaugural FinCEN-FinTRAC summit also included officials from financial intelligence units in Australia, the Netherlands and Britain. FinCEN highlighted the importance of "close collaboration" between Canada and the U.S. It also stressed "the power of reporting by financial institutions and the sharing of that information between governments." This new unity of purpose between FinCEN and FinTRAC is the latest sign that Washington will no longer tolerate Canadian passivity on financial crime in the wake of TD Bank's money-laundering scandal in the U.S. American regulators have lost confidence in their Canadian counterparts, and the only way for Ottawa to redeem itself is to close the yawning gaps between the U.S. and Canadian anti-money-laundering and anti-terrorist-financing regimes.