Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I offer my thanks to Mr. Bergeron for inviting me to offer views on the bill before you. I would also like to thank those who have taken the time and made the effort to put forward this bill, particularly Ms. Lantsman, who sponsored it and has defended its purposes so eloquently.

I strongly support any and all measures aimed at providing the managers of complex international hostage crises with additional tools and greater room to manoeuvre. There is a vigorous debate—only some of it in public—about whether governments should even negotiate, let alone make any kind of deal, with hostage-takers or, more specifically, pay ransoms or exchange prisoners to free their citizens, as the Americans did only yesterday. This dilemma is particularly acute when victims are sent into harm's way by those same governments, or by international organizations acting on behalf of their member states.

There tend to be significant differences between what governments do and what they say. That's exactly as it should be. Every time a principled position is invoked, there are exceptions. Many countries adopt what are, admittedly, more or less pragmatic approaches, while others proclaim immutable doctrine. However, I know for certain that every country has blinked at one time or another. Degrees of flexibility and innovation, along with a measure of humility, are essential ingredients to any successful outcome. This bill offers negotiators more flexibility and the opportunity for innovation. When doctrinaire and vainglorious posturing replaces effective and nuanced diplomacy, people die.

On November 3, 2015, the jihadis of Abu Sayyaf posted a Twitter video in which they threatened to murder John Ridsdel and fellow Canadian Robert Hall, along with their companions in captivity Marites Flor and Norwegian Kjartan Sekkingstad. The fact that both Hall and Ridsdel were subsequently brutally murdered and their families forced to endure the worldwide distribution of videos of their beheadings is a brutal catastrophe—and a source of significant distress to me and my family, as we all thought for months that this would be my fate. For the Ridsdel and Hall families, the nightmares will never end. Such a horrific outcome was, in my view, the result of our government's dogged intransigence, lack of imagination and utter ignorance of how these dramas actually play out in the real world.

It would seem to me that measures focused on bending the will of states to our purposes would principally apply to smaller, poorer and weaker states. Such measures are less likely to be effective against a major power such as China. Our government had all the tools it needed to win the release of the two Michaels at almost any point, which only makes their ordeal all the more upsetting. I am not here, though, to relitigate that fraught affair, and I must state that I'm terribly glad they're all finally safe.

I know well that grand declarations, whether or not they are widely endorsed, of what is right and good and of how the world ought to be managed, particularly by those insisting on how very good we are, are unlikely to change international behaviour, move the hearts of terrorists anywhere or alter the behaviour of states detaining our nationals. We Canadians take ourselves awfully seriously. We tend to believe that what we do and how we do it will have a great impact on what others do. In the main, this is simply not so. The countries of the world will not be moved to different behaviour by moral preaching from Canada, and Canadians around the world will be made no safer.

I have spent much of my life promoting, defending and trying to advance a rules-based international order, but I have always understood full well, although sometimes with ill grace, that those rules would regularly and inevitably be bent and often broken, most often by the most powerful, including our friends. Lest we forget, we are not powerful.

Looking back 16 years, the issue that causes me visceral anger is the lack of trust, courtesy and even basic respect on the part of too many of those charged with dealing with our families—that is, Louis Guay's and my family. This attitude, in our family's view, too often threatens, however unreasonably, to overshadow the hard, innovative work done by so many others to win our freedom.

Thank you. I look forward to your questions.

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