Criminal Wealth Law: From Maple Syrup to Hells Angels and Unexplained Wealth Orders

A significant dimension of modern crime management focuses on property, wealth, money, and financial activity. The organizing theme of late twentieth-century products such as anti-money laundering laws, criminal confiscation, criminal forfeiture, and civil forfeiture is detecting and capturing wealth associated with criminal activity. Such products, which have proliferated since the inception of modern management in the late 1980s, might be described as criminal wealth law. An area of acute contemporary interest, a trilogy of recent developments, might be said to mark a certain sharpening of the edges of Canadian criminal wealth law. The first, a Supreme Court of Canada decision involving the theft of maple syrup, hones federal criminal forfeiture machinery, the principal anti-criminal wealth device. The second, a British Columbia Court of Appeal decision about clubhouses owned by the Hells Angels, sharpens a provincial criminal wealth device, civil forfeiture law. The third, arguably the most substantively significant of the trilogy, introduces a new tool to a province’s wealth-focused toolkit, an unexplained wealth order regime. This essay examines this trilogy of contributions to criminal wealth law.