Regarding FACFOA, Canada took an important step forward in adopting the law just a few years ago. My only observation, again from the outside in, is that it's a little strange, as I read it as an outsider, to say that you can only take actions to freeze the funds of corrupt foreign government or former government officials or their families in cases where the government in question has specifically asked the Government of Canada to impose such actions. To me, you see many corrupt governments all over the world, particularly authoritarian governments, in which endemic corruption drives their actions and where foreign leaders particularly enjoy travelling abroad because of the challenges of enjoying life in such countries, and where they need to be held to account because, frankly, the people aren't capable of doing that themselves.
It would seem to me that having the authorities and exercising the authorities are two very different things. I understand that politically it will be challenging for any government to decide that it's going to impose sanctions against foreign corrupt officials or their family members because there is a question of the sufficiency of the evidence you can gather. But it does seem to me in the most egregious cases...and one can look not only to a case like the Maldives but to other countries like Malaysia, for example, right now, where the prime minister himself acknowledged that he received something around $650-plus million in his personal bank account from Saudi Arabia, from unknown persons, and then he returned, he says, all but about $50 million of it.
This is what he said publicly, yet in such a circumstance, unless he were to ask the Government of Canada to look at the question of sanctions, Canada wouldn't have those authorities. From my perspective, in very egregious circumstances where you're talking about grand corruption on the largest of scales, it might be useful if Canada were to have the authorities within FACFOA to take unilateral action without a government request.
I'm not suggesting Canada should be the world's policeman on corruption and go off looking at every country in the world and all of the possible corruption. I'm talking about egregious outlier cases where the international community has condemned governments for being particularly engaged in this kind of grand-scale corruption.