I am one of the people who spent the last 10 years involved in a man-to-man fight with Vladimir Putin. It originated from my advocacy for the Magnitsky act all over the world. Many of you will know me from the work I've done with many members of Parliament in Canada over this issue.
I've seen the ways in which Putin and his regime go after enemies, people they consider to be the enemies, countries they consider to be enemies and so on. I just wanted to share a few thoughts at the very beginning of this conversation about the state of play with the war in Ukraine, about our reaction to that war, about Putin's reaction to our reaction and about things that might be done to protect ourselves, Canada and the west more generally.
First and foremost, the Government of Canada and the governments of the United States, EU, U.K. and Australia have done a fine job of imposing sanctions as a way of trying to cripple Vladimir Putin's war effort. The sanctions have been more impressive than I would have expected and perhaps even more impressive than I would have asked for. If we look at the number of people and the names of the people sanctioned, it's really something to be proud of.
The problem is—and this is something that's come from my own research—I estimate that the amount of money the criminal regime of Vladimir Putin has stolen from the Russian people since 2000 when Vladimir Putin came to power is about a trillion dollars. He and the top 1,000 people have taken a trillion dollars out of Russia and that money is sitting in the west. As we put sanctions in place to try to restrict their access to that money so they can't use it for the war effort, if we look at what's actually been frozen from those sanctions, it's a tiny, de minimis portion of that money that's been taken out of Russia.
The reason for that is there's been a huge amount of sanctions evasion. When we put a person on the sanctions list, that person may have some assets in their own name, but that person may also be using all sorts of complicated structures—holding companies, etc.—to hold their assets. They also use family members, nominees, custodians and trust companies, etc. That's one of the ways in which they are sort of fighting back and keeping their money hidden.
Another way the Putin regime is reacting to our efforts to cut them off is that they're weaponizing everything that they can weaponize. They're weaponizing the price of wheat by restricting the export of wheat from Ukraine. They're weaponizing the price of oil by pushing up the price of oil. They're weaponizing the price of gas. Those three things will have a very dramatic effect on all democracies going forward. A lot of people are not going to be worried about Ukraine. They're going to be worried about the price of food at home. They're going to worry about putting gas in their car. They're going to be worried about heating their houses.
As we think of how we want to be responding to this weaponization, we have to look very specifically at these three things and figure out if there are ways we can reduce their ability to weaponize these prices.
In the case of oil, Saudi Arabia is the largest oil supplier in the world. Saudi Arabia has the capacity to increase its oil production. If it was to do that—