Thank you very much.
Professor Nossal, thank you for sharing your skepticism with us today. Indeed, we've heard that in fact the problems of compliance in Canada do impose significant resource costs on the banking system, on the different sectors that don't have access to consolidated lists to comply sometimes with sanctions. In fact, some potentially legal business is lost in simple avoidance because of the fear of violation of sanctions.
You brought up the Magnitsky Act. We have in fact been dealing with aspects of it for some time, even before this study officially began. I think we've been told that the Magnitsky Act isn't so much to change the behaviour as to ostracize and isolate certain gross abusers who are not caught in the Freezing Assets of Corrupt Foreign Officials Act because they are not necessarily designated individuals. They are jailers. They are police officers. They are security people who have enriched themselves criminally and who look to take some of those funds and themselves and their families to safe havens in different parts of the world.
I think that when the U.S. Congress passed the Magnitsky Act it was in the hope that other countries separately would accept similar penalties on these individuals—again, targeted Russian criminal individuals—and that by shunning, they would send a message and achieve a purpose through that alone. I wonder if you could speak to the Magnitsky Act.