When the federal government announced its plan to create a Financial Crimes Agency of Canada (FCA), the focus quickly turned to banks and money laundering. But for Bryan Gast (pictured), national vice president of investigative services at Équité Association, the agency’s long-term potential lies in how it can amplify the work insurers are already doing to dismantle organized crime networks.
After three decades in policing with the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP), Gast joined the property and casualty insurance sector six years ago and was “pleasantly surprised” by the industry’s appetite for tackling organized fraud. “The desire to combat insurance crime – the totality of it, including auto theft, towing, and organized fraud – is strong,” he said. “They created a single entity, naming it Équité Association, with the sole mandate of combating insurance crime.”
Équité’s investigators work across the industry on large-scale, cross-insurer investigations, assembling detailed intelligence packages for law enforcement. “We prepare packages that are very, very detailed, with network analysis looking at organized crime groups or the links to the organized crime groups,” Gast said. While the organization does not have criminal investigative powers, it applies evidentiary standards to ensure police can act on its referrals. “We provide a comprehensive investigative package that conforms to the rules of evidence and the legal sharing of information. Law enforcement is then able to take it, use their investigative authorities, and track the money.”
Tracking financial flows, Gast said, is often the starting point in identifying who is profiting – and who sits at the heart of the network. That approach aligns closely with the federal agency’s purpose: to coordinate complex financial crime enforcement and connect intelligence across jurisdictions.
For Équité, the FCA could help bridge one of Canada’s biggest enforcement gaps – the jurisdictional boundaries that slow investigations and obscure the national scope of organized insurance crime. “There are so many jurisdictional boundaries within Canada, but the criminals abide by no jurisdiction,” Gast said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s municipal or regional or provincial or federal, they are preying on a variety of sectors.”
He pointed to cases where criminal groups operate across multiple provinces, exploiting fragmented oversight. “We’re already seeing organized crime groups that are working between Ontario and Quebec, and Ontario and Alberta – same groups,” he said. Those patterns underscore why a national agency could add momentum to the kind of intelligence-led model Équité already uses. “What we’re doing on a smaller scale could absolutely be a benefit to looking at it at a national level.”
The FCA’s ability to draw connections between financial data, insurance claims, and other sectors would make it easier to uncover cross-sector schemes that previously slipped through jurisdictional cracks. The same networks behind stolen vehicles, staged collisions, or fraudulent medical claims often move funds through banks, shell companies, or cross-border accounts. A centralized intelligence body could align those strands into a single investigative picture.
Gast described organized insurance fraud as a lucrative, deliberately structured business. Groups exploit every weak link in the chain: towing, repair shops, paralegals, storage yards, medical facilities, and staged collisions. These operations not only inflate claims but also funnel proceeds into broader criminal enterprises. “All they care about is finding opportunities to defraud or commit financial crime,” he said.
By integrating the insurance sector into a wider financial crime framework, Gast believes investigators will be able to follow those links faster and further. The FCA’s structure – expected to include intelligence sharing between public and private entities – could enable more systematic use of the data Équité already collects and analyses on behalf of its member insurers.
The association’s existing partnerships provide a blueprint. It already collaborates with the Canadian Bankers Association and participates in joint policing forums such as the Canadian and Ontario Associations of Chiefs of Police. Those networks will likely expand once the FCA begins operations, creating a stronger bridge between the banking and insurance spheres.
Gast emphasized that the goal is not to duplicate existing efforts but to scale them. Équité’s cross-insurer model has proven that collaboration works; the FCA can transform it into a coordinated, nationwide system with federal authority and reach. “Having this type of federal agency focused on financial crimes is definitely well needed,” he said. “There’s going to be connectivity between all sectors, private and public – particularly the banks and the insurance industry.”
Such connectivity would allow insurers’ intelligence to inform national enforcement strategies, rather than staying confined within sector boundaries. For investigators, it would mean faster access to credible data on claims fraud, organized theft, and emerging financial patterns. For law enforcement, it could mean the difference between isolated arrests and dismantled networks.
Gast stressed that organized crime thrives on fragmentation – and that the FCA’s formation is a direct threat to that advantage. “What drives them is money,” he said. “They wake up every morning looking for ways to commit their crimes.”
By combining the data-rich insight of insurers with federal investigative powers, the FCA could strip organized networks of the secrecy and jurisdictional loopholes that sustain them. “If you take organized crime out of the picture,” Gast said, “it benefits all – not only public safety, but financially as well.”
