Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to the witnesses for being here today and sharing their expertise with us.
This is a study I brought forward for this committee to look at in May of last year, so I'm glad we have begun doing this work. I think it's very important. I think we all understand the importance of having an effective, transparent, consistent and effectively enforced sanctions regime. Certainly, I don't feel confident that is the case. As we listened to some of the questions that came ahead of me.... The failure to implement some of those recommendations that came out of the 2017 report is problematic.
When committees do this work and come forward with recommendations—I know there are 19 recommendations that have come forward from the Senate review—and those recommendations aren't implemented, that gives me pause about whether or not the government is listening to the important work that parliamentary committees are doing.
One of the things we heard from the witnesses to date is the idea that sanctions are used as a signal and that sanctions are used to shame, I guess, those who are being sanctioned. I would put out there that without enforcement of the sanctions, that signal is very diminished. Without transparency and without consistency, that signal we are trying to send is greatly diminished.
The first question I have is with regard, again, to that 2017 study. The foreign affairs committee recommended that the Government of Canada “properly resource and reform the structures responsible for its sanctions regimes, in order to effectively impose sanctions on targeted states and persons”.
I'm wondering how many personnel in Global Affairs Canada are working on the sanctions policy and administration today, and how that has changed since 2017.