In the days following the historic prisoner swap on August 1 that saw Canadian-American Paul Whelan and another 15 people released from Russian prison, there are growing questions about how democracies can counter the rising tactic of hostage diplomacy.

Russia continues to hold Westerners hostage, and the use of hostage-taking and arbitrary detention by authoritarian regimes to advance their own ends is a phenomenon that will only expand unless the West takes a stronger stand.

The safety of Canadians all over the world is at stake. This is a phenomenon that goes beyond Russia. Many Canadians—including Huseyin Celil, Zahra Kazemi, Homa Hoodfar, Sun Qian, and Xiao Jianhua—have been seized as hostages by terrorist groups and by authoritarian regimes including China and Iran. Several—Huseyin Celil, Sun Qian, and Xiao Jianhua—remain imprisoned as hostages today. For others, their status is unknown. For instance, the family of Behnoush Bahraminia, an Iranian-Canadian woman, believes she is currently detained in Iran along with her partner, Majid (Mathew) Safari.

In response to all these incidents, it is time for Canada to introduce effective and specific legislation to combat hostage-taking and arbitrary detentions, sending a clear signal to perpetrators that these crimes are unacceptable.

While diplomacy and back-room negotiations can at times result in the successful release of hostages and those arbitrarily detained, it is currently one of Canada’s only options for response.

There are also limited options for government officials to use existing human rights laws to leverage pressure. For example, while Canada’s version of the U.S. Magnitsky Act theoretically permits targeted sanctions to be implemented in response to any gross human rights violations, British barrister Amal Clooney has noted that there is an “apparent reticence among some policy-makers (across the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and Canada) to use sanctions in response to cases of arbitrary detention or against judicial officers for such detention or unfair trials.”

To address the law and policy gap in relation to hostage-taking and arbitrary detention, Co-Deputy Conservative Leader Melissa Lantsman last fall introduced the federal private member’s bill C-353, the Foreign Hostage Takers Accountability Act. Bill C-353 passed second reading on June 5 and is expected to be considered in committee when Parliament resumes.

Bill C-353, which is based on the January 2021 legislative proposal co-published by Secure Canada (formerly known as the Canadian Coalition Against Terror) and the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, would provide Canadian officials with more tools to effectively combat hostage-taking and arbitrary detention in state-to-state relations.

The first part of the bill would create a dedicated sanctions mechanism whereby sanctions can be imposed on foreign nationals, foreign states, or foreign entities responsible for, or complicit in, the hostage-taking or arbitrary detention of Canadian nationals or refugees. Sanctions may also be levied against foreign nationals, foreign states, or foreign entities that have materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support for, or goods or services in support of, such hostage-taking or arbitrary detention.

The second part of the bill would require Canadian officials to provide more consistent support to family members of those held hostage or arbitrarily detained abroad. A Toronto Star investigation from 2016 exposed the inconsistent, inadequate nature of the government’s support and communications with families of hostages, but very little has changed in this regard since then.

The third part of the bill would encourage and enable increased multilateral cooperation by, among other things, enabling the Canadian government to provide monetary rewards and/or refugee protection to foreign nationals who provide information leading to the release and repatriation of a Canadian hostage or individual arbitrarily detained. These discretionary tools may serve not only to incentivize cooperation but also to protect those who help us by bringing them to safety in Canada.

In February 2021, Canada launched the Declaration Against Arbitrary Detention in State-to-State Relations in Ottawa. The next natural step is substantial legal reform to address specific gaps.

Going beyond declarations and passing substantive law to combat hostage-taking and arbitrary detention in state-to-state relations will help improve the safety of Canadians abroad by giving greater teeth to the government’s efforts to combat these crimes and, ultimately, deter the behaviour in the first place. Such legislation may embolden policymakers to leverage a variety of tools to pressure those responsible and raise the costs associated with taking Canadians hostage.

The federal government’s annual cabinet retreat is taking place this week, with Liberal ministers on hand in Halifax to discuss the most pressing issues facing the country ahead of the fall legislative session. Immigration and housing are two of the biggest items on the agenda, in particular the drastic rise in the number of temporary foreign workers being employed in Canada over the past two years. Economist and Hub contributor Mike Moffatt was invited to Halifax to present on these issues. His remarks to cabinet are reproduced below.

In the next 54 minutes, Canada’s population will grow by 100 people.

In the next 54 minutes, Canada will start building 24 homes. Two-thirds of these will be apartments, and the majority of those will be one-bedroom or studio units.

Collectively, those 24 homes will house between 50-60 people. Let’s be generous and call it 65.

In the next 54 minutes, we will add 100 people, but only enough housing for 65 people, leaving the remainder, 35, effectively homeless. That’s 35 people, a group the size of the federal cabinet, with nowhere to call home. Every 54 minutes.

In the past three-and-a-half years, Canada’s population has grown by three million people, a few thousand people more than in the entire 1990s. The good news is that we’ve built as many apartment units as we did back then. The bad news is that we’ve built 900,000 fewer single-detached, semi-detached, and row homes. And the 1990s were arguably the worst post-war decade for homebuilding.

That’s the hole Canada has dug for itself: nearly one million family-sized homes in three-and-a-half years.

Like in other Anglosphere countries, Canada’s housing crisis was caused by disconnected housing and population growth policies. Let’s start with housing. In the past twenty years, development charges have risen by over 2000 percent in some Ontario cities. Land transfer taxes and other charges were introduced, which substantially raised the cost of housing and shifted the tax base from the old to the young. Land use policies became exceptionally restrictive, and the building code and other regulations made it all but impossible to make affordable family-sized apartment units. All orders of government treated a unit as a unit as a unit, under the erroneous belief that a 450 square-foot studio apartment is an adequate substitute for a child-friendly three-bedroom home.

Our population growth policies have been equally problematic. Our immigration system has shifted away from adding to the skills and cultural vibrancy of Canada to creating an underclass of guest workers. It has become a tool to allow provinces to cut funding to higher education. Once again, a transfer of wealth to the old from the young.

Fortunately, these are solvable problems, and I am encouraged that the federal government has taken substantial steps on both housing and population growth. More can be done—there is still a suite of unimplemented housing policy ideas in the National Housing Accord, the Blueprint for More and Better Housing, and from the Affordability Action Council. I would particularly encourage governments to focus on creating the conditions for family-friendly density—that is, units with three or more bedrooms. At a minimum, that will require building code changes, scaling back development charges to the levels of a decade ago, and increasing the GST rebate on new homes.

On population growth, yesterday’s temporary foreign worker reforms are welcome news, but Canada must go much further. The TFW program, particularly the low-wage non-agricultural stream, suppresses wage growth, increases youth unemployment, creates the conditions for the exploitation of foreign workers, and reduces productivity, as it disincentivizes companies from investing in productivity-enhancing equipment. The low-wage stream should be entirely abolished, and the other streams should be substantially reformed, including creating a system of open permits.

Population growth targets, including both permanent and non-permanent residents, and housing growth targets, should all be incorporated into the annual release of the Immigration Levels Plan. The targets must be aligned, to ensure population growth does not outpace homebuilding, which will require substantial reductions in the permanent resident target over the next few years.

Like most economists, I support a robust immigration system and believe the current targets are achievable in the long run. In the meantime, however, we need to give ourselves time to allow homebuilding to catch up to past population growth, requiring a substantial reduction in the permanent resident target back to the levels of a decade ago.

We should be clear that this is not about blaming immigrants for Canada’s issues. Rather we must recognize that when we invite people to our country, we need to ensure that we have in place the conditions for them to succeed. We do them no favours, and us no favours, by setting them up to fail.

And we should be clear that we are setting people up to fail, particularly Millennials and Gen Z. Rents on new leases in Halifax are up 75 percent in the past five years. It should come as no surprise that the 2024 World Happiness Report found that Canadians under the age of 30 are the 58th happiest in the world. They are being denied a path to middle-class prosperity.

We can and must do better. Thank you for having me here today.