I'm not sure which metaphor to use, high school spin-the-bottle or the more adult and a little sharper Russian roulette, but there's a bit of that.
Let's start with delisting. It's impossible to talk about delisting without the flip side, which is how they got there in the first place. They're equally non-transparent processes. On one level, you understand why: you don't want governments, when they list somebody as being active in, take Iran, somehow affiliated with the Iranian national guard and very active in the proliferation of the nuclear program, the military nuclear program. You don't want to disclose intelligence sources and how you know that, so I get the reason for being a bit more circumspect. Let me give you the back end, and it's the same thing on the delisting.
You're saying the more recent government; I'll give you another example going back to when these sanctions were first introduced by your government six years ago. One of my clients, a Canadian company that was exporting medical equipment to Iran, to a particular company there, found itself on the list. I represented them. It took a year and a half to get them off the list.
The right I have as a listed company is to ask the minister why I'm listed. One of the things they told me right at the outset was that there was reason to believe the company was involved in the delivery of weapons of mass destruction. The company was basically in the process of importing dialysis equipment and various other things such as that. I don't know, but I'm guessing that catheters might not be the most efficient means to deliver weapons of mass destruction. I'm not an expert in WMD, so I'll leave it at that. However, it took a year and half to get through this process. The irony was that the very first call, literally, was within a week of the sanctions being promulgated in July 2010.
My client, the owner of the company, is a Canadian citizen, an Iranian Canadian citizen. What he told me was, “Oh, and by the way, we're one of the few Iranian companies that OFAC”—the Office of Foreign Assets Control, the so-called gold standard in the U.S.—“licenses American companies to export to.” When I finally had to deal with the Department of Foreign Affairs, my conversation went a bit like, “Okay, what do you guys know that the CIA doesn't know?”
I have my suspicions that what happened was somebody pulled a list from CBSA and said, “Okay, who's exporting to Iran? Who's importing from Iran? Boom, put them all on the list.” My gut tells me that may have happened, having been around this a lot before. It's not so much the lack of transparency that's important, it's the point that James Walsh made earlier, which is that sanctions work when there's a coherent reason for doing this particular thing. If what we're doing is imposing sanctions, or lifting sanctions—because it works both ways, the listing and the delisting—because it's a good political statement, you're making a good political statement. As Mr. Walsh said, you might also be imposing costs on the target. However, I can assure you that you're also imposing costs on Canadian businesses.
When I'm looking and trying to figure out why company X is on the list, or why individual Y is on the list, and trying to advise a client because they've come up in some search, you know what, I don't know. When you're imposing costs that way on yourself, the best analogy I can say is that I think it's more Russian roulette. What you're doing, for no cognizable reason in terms of why you're focusing on this person, is basically taking yourself, Canadian business, and grabbing yourself by the throat, putting the gun to your head, and saying, “Comply or the dummy buys it.” It's kind of silly.