I would answer yes, absolutely, but with a massive “but”. This is something that we saw clearly in the debate on sanctions against Iran in the last couple of weeks.
Our ability and our capacity to monitor and enforce sanctions in this country is massively overstretched, and Canada has a reputation among its allies—as well as among the bad guys—of not being good at enforcing sanctions. We declare them and we don't follow up. At some point that's damaging, because it signals to the bad guys that when we impose sanctions, we don't follow up and we don't enforce them.
The answer is yes, but there is a major need to significantly increase the resources for our sanctions capacity at Global Affairs, CSIS, the RCMP, the CBSA and elsewhere. The $76 million that the government announced last week is a good first step, but it's really not enough. We don't have a lot of detail, but I'm not even sure it's enough to do what they said they'd do on Iran, let alone on Russia and other countries on which we are not fully imposing the sanctions that we've declared. That means human resources, but it also means improving the process, including on information sharing, but on other aspects too.
There's a big gap between what we say and what we do.