Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you very much. It's good to meet you here. I'll use the real-life example of the Magnitsky case. Sergei Magnitsky was murdered for uncovering a $230-million corruption scheme. The people who stole that money and killed him kept that money in the west. We wanted to shut down the west to them, so that they couldn't use their bank accounts and they couldn't travel.

Foreign Affairs committee  I think it's very important for both things to happen. I think that Parliament is very important, and this committee is very important in holding the government's feet to the fire. Once the government's feet have been held to the fire and when the government has made a conscious, proactive decision to do something, it's very much incumbent on it to call up its counterparts in the United States, the U.K. and the European Union and say, “We have evidence.

Foreign Affairs committee  Do I have time to answer this?

Foreign Affairs committee  I think that this is a historical view that was taken by previous governments that didn't want to offend Putin. Putin is very offended by the word “Magnitsky”. In the past, different foreign ministers didn't want to offend Putin when we were in the world of appeasement. We're not in a world of appeasement anymore.

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you, Mr. McKay. This is really an important issue. Vladimir Kara-Murza, as I mentioned, is facing 24 years in prison for standing up to the Putin regime. As many of you will know, he was poisoned twice, in 2015 and 2017, by the Russian government and nearly died in both cases.

Foreign Affairs committee  Should I go first?

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes. Canada, from my perspective, doesn't have an infrastructure in which to prosecute high-level financial crimes. We've seen it with our own eyes in relation to the Magnitsky case. We brought evidence to the RCMP about dirty money from the Magnitsky murder coming to Canada. That information was not acted on properly, in spite of law enforcement agencies in many other countries acting on the same evidence decisively.

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you very much for this opportunity to discuss the Magnitsky act in Canada and the ways in which we can amend and improve it. As many members of the committee know, I was one of the original advocates of the Canadian Magnitsky act. Sergei Magnitsky was my lawyer in Russia.