Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
My question is for Mr. Kramer.
I'm particularly concerned about unintended consequences. We have heard from, arguably, the foremost expert on sanctions policy in Canada, from Kim Richard Nossal, recently on the ability of authoritarian regimes to simply ignore or not be impacted by sanctions. There's a 2010 article, written by two noted academics, Joseph Wright and Abel Escribà-Folch, “Dealing with Tyranny: International Sanctions and the Survival of Authoritarian Rulers”. In that article they say that authoritarian regimes respond to sanctions by simply raising their tax revenue, and in turn, directing those funds to the maintenance of their tools of repression, such as the police, the military, and so on and so forth.
I'm particularly concerned, if we went down this road, how Russia would respond, and has responded, frankly. It doesn't look like the Magnitsky act has elicited the kind of political change that we had hoped for. I'm certainly not one that agrees with what Russia has done in the Ukraine and elsewhere, and I see that there are issues of a democratic deficit in Russia. However, if Canada goes down the road of enacting its own Magnitsky act, are there going to be unintended consequences, namely the empowering of the Russian state?