Foreign Affairs committee  Yes. To address your first question, that's right. Companies will sometimes come to us after they've already attempted to get that advice from Global Affairs, although often it's before. Frankly, as legal counsel, we still have a role, regardless of whether we're getting directi

Foreign Affairs committee  As I've already said, I prefer using the smart and targeted sanctions. That's very much what we are talking about here. I know everyone has the best of intentions when it comes to gross human rights violators, and we want to make sure that we not only send that signal you were ta

Foreign Affairs committee  I would add that these targeted measures, which I think they've referred to as smart sanctions, are a step forward. They've been used more often recently. To the extent that we're able to avoid the broader measures, which are blunter sticks, when we impose financial services bans

Foreign Affairs committee  It's John here, and I'll take a very quick crack at that. You may recall the situation of a Mr. Abdelrazik, who was a Canadian stuck in Sudan and was unable to return to Canada because he was on a UN list. The UN can screw these things up sometimes. Sometimes people are on list

Foreign Affairs committee  It's a good point. Our Belarus measures are export controls. They're not economic sanctions. What the U.S. did with Belarus was in large part a list-based sanctions measure. They identified certain parties you couldn't do business with related to Belarus and the Belarus governmen

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes. I have just a couple of points on that. One is Canada has a made-in-Canada policy in many of these cases and when you compare just the sanctions policy with respect to Russia, Iran, Cuba, Burma, and these other countries, they're not identical. A Canadian company has to pay

Foreign Affairs committee  Your point about over-compliance is an excellent one. It really is for many companies, including financial institutions, an issue of risk mitigation, Even though there are situations in which they might be able to argue that one could go forward with a transaction under the Canad

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you for that question. As I was alluding to in my remarks, I'm not disputing that sanctions can be an effective policy tool particularly on the signalling side. I'm not here to say that we should never use sanctions. They're a valid tool. But what's interesting, I always f

Foreign Affairs committee  That's a great point. When we add names to these lists, again I hope the committee understands that these lists are individual lists under individual regulations. When a company, especially an SME, addresses that situation, if we have 20 different sanctions regulations, each has

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the committee members and the committee clerk for inviting me to appear today to discuss Canada's economic sanctions. The views I express today are my own. I'm not appearing on behalf of anyone else or any of our firm's clients.