(Ottawa) The New Democratic Party (NDP) argues that the liberal government’s sanctions are in fact “political theatre,” while new data shows few funds have been frozen and none seized.
Posted at 5:20 p.m
Dylan Robertson The Canadian Press
“This government always congratulates itself for adding names to the list of people sanctioned,” NDP MP Heather McPherson remarked in the House of Commons on Tuesday.
“Liberals say sanctions are an important part of our foreign policy, but there’s no enforcement, no investigations and almost nothing that’s seized,” she said.
The federal government is announcing new sanctions almost weekly that will ban people with ties to authoritarian regimes from conducting financial transactions in Canada and from entering the country.
However, data released by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) shows that the amount of money frozen in Canadian bank accounts remained virtually unchanged between June and December last year.
As of June 7, Canada had frozen $123 million in domestic assets and blocked $289 million worth of transactions related to sanctions against Russia.
At the end of December, the RCMP said that 122 million assets had been seized and 292 million transactions had been blocked, although hundreds more people linked to Russia had been added to the sanctions list.
The police could not explain why the amounts declared by the financial institutions had hardly changed during this period. In December, the RCMP also found that no bank had informed them of the existence of sanctioned Haitians or Iranians holding assets in Canada.
In addition, the parliamentary disclosures requested by Ms McPherson show that Ottawa has still not implemented a law passed last June that allows the government to seize funds from sanctioned individuals and redirect them to victims of wrongdoing.
For example, in December the government issued a property seizure order to begin proceedings to seize $26 million owned by a company owned by Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, but it has yet to file a lawsuit in court.
Ms McPherson argues that Canada is using sanctions as a token tool without taking the necessary steps to actually discourage support for autocracies.
Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly responded to the NDP MP’s criticism by offering to cooperate with the NDP in applying sanctions to confiscate the assets of the targets.
“We are the first country in the world to do this and we will lead,” she said during Question Time.
Sanctions experts have long argued that Canada lacks the means to properly oversee its sanctions regime, such as B. tracking financial transactions and tracking asset trades.