(OTTAWA) The Senate Foreign Affairs Committee is calling on the federal government to clarify its reasons for imposing sanctions, and to improve the way it assesses whether its financial embargoes and travel bans are having a real effect.
Senators say in a report tabled Tuesday that Ottawa needs to do better with “law enforcement, procedural fairness and transparency” in its decisions to discipline individuals, needs to be more clear about how a targeted individual can do so appeal and must specify what it expects from companies.
Committee Chairman Peter Boehm says the report comes a year after the federal government expanded the list of people subject to sanctions because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
In 2022 alone, Ottawa has imposed new sanctions on more than 1,600 individuals and entities with ties to Moscow 44 times.
Several experts told the committee, however, they wondered how tough Ottawa is on those who disregard its sanctions, when only one person and one company has been charged with it in more than three decades.
According to the senators, this provides very little legal precedent to help companies interpret the rules.
For example, the United States, Great Britain and the European Union indicate the minimum percentage of shares of a company that the person sanctioned must hold for their companies not to have the right to do business with.
Canada does not specify this percentage, which forces its companies to err on the side of caution. However, the Canadian government has promised to hire more personnel to enforce the sanctions.
The senators argue that Ottawa should create a simpler process for removing people from the list of sanctioned entities.
They suggest that the sanctions should be formally renewed every five years or else be cancelled.
The senators also accuse Ottawa of “publishing declarations of intent” abstract and that the absence of a concrete objective makes it impossible to assess the real effects of the sanctions. According to them, the government should “clearly communicate these objectives to the public”.
In addition to all these changes, Canada should publish reports on the amount of assets frozen or seized annually, in addition to creating an easily accessible database that would list all sanctioned entities and “the reason why”.
Also, the government is currently not obligated to notify those who have been added to the list, explain why, or tell them how they can appeal the decision.
In October, a Foreign Ministry official testified before the committee that 18 people had asked to be removed from the list since 2018. One of those requests was denied, he said. The others never received a response.