Dylan Robertson, The Canadian Press

OTTAWA — The Senate Foreign Affairs Committee is calling on the federal government to clarify the reasons for imposing sanctions and to improve the way it assesses whether its finance embargoes and travel bans are actually having an effect.

Senators say in a report Tuesday that Ottawa needs to do better in its decisions to discipline individuals with respect to “law enforcement, procedural fairness and transparency,” clarifying how a data subject can appeal and specifying what they expect from companies.

Committee chair Peter Boehm said the report came a year after the federal government expanded the list of people under sanctions over the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

In 2022 alone, Ottawa imposed new sanctions 44 times on more than 1,600 people and entities with ties to Moscow.

However, several experts told the committee they wondered how tough Ottawa was cracking down on those who flouted its sanctions when only one person and one company had been charged in more than three decades.

According to the senators, this offers very little legal precedent to help companies interpret the rules.

For example, the United States, United Kingdom, and the European Union specify the minimum percentage of shares in a company that the sanctioned person must hold in order for their companies not to have the right to do business with them.

Canada doesn’t report this percentage, forcing its companies to err on the side of caution. However, the Canadian government has promised to hire more staff 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 officially renewed or lifted every five years.

The senators also accused Ottawa of “publishing abstract statements of intent” and that the lack of a specific target made it impossible to assess the real impact of the sanctions. According to them, the government should “clearly communicate these goals to the public”.

In addition to all these changes, Canada should publish annual reports on the amount of assets frozen or confiscated, and also create an easily accessible database listing all sanctioned companies and “the reason why”.

Also, the government is not currently required to notify those who have been included in the list, explain why, or tell them how to appeal the decision.

In October, a State Department official testified before the committee that 18 people had asked to be delisted since 2018. One of those requests was denied, he said. The others never received an answer.