Terror Shouldn’t Pay in Canada

Op-Ed: '“Pay-for-slay” programs provide salaries, stipends, or other benefits to individuals who have committed terrorist attacks."

By Sarah Teich

Most terrorist financing stays hidden — moving through shell companies, informal transfer networks, and charities existing only on paper. There is, however, a category of terrorist financing that operates in the open, written into legislation and funded through public budgets. These are the structured payment programs known colloquially as “pay-for-slay” programs.

As I explain in my paper for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and Secure Canada, These “Pay-for-slay” programs provide salaries, stipends, or other benefits to individuals who have committed terrorist attacks and to their families, calibrated to the severity of the violence and Canadian law has never once been used to confront them

Examples of this practice span decades.

Saddam Hussein’s government paid families of Palestinian suicide bombers more than double what it paid any others. Iranian state institutions have channelled similar support through affiliated foundations. The Palestinian Authority’s stipend program, in place since 2004, ties payments to imprisonment for participation in what its own legislation calls the struggle against the occupation, and raises them with the length of the sentence.

That link is more direct than it may sound, because Israeli courts routinely impose separate life sentences for each person an attacker kills. The Hamas bombmaker behind a string of suicide attacks in the early 2000s received 67 consecutive life terms, one for each victim killed and one more for the hundreds wounded. A program that pays according to sentence length is, in effect, paying according to body count.

Canada is not without tools to address this phenomenon, or the harm done to Canadians killed and injured in terrorist attacks abroad.

The terrorism financing, participation, and facilitation offences in the Criminal Code, alongside the sanctions powers in the Special Economic Measures Act and the Sergei Magnitsky Law, were written broadly enough to arguably capture “pay-for-slay” programs.

The difficulty is that none of these provisions explicitly names the conduct. Faced with that uncertainty, enforcement authorities have understandably hesitated. The result is a quiet but telling fact that, as far as we know, no individual has ever been prosecuted in Canada for involvement in a “pay-for-slay” program, and no foreign official has ever been sanctioned on this basis.

Other states have identified these programs as a concern but relied on foreign aid conditionality, withholding assistance until payments incentivizing terrorism are stopped. Conditionality has advantages, but the weakness is apparent: it works only to the extent the target depends on the donor, and after years of pressure from multiple governments, the Palestinian Authority’s program, for one, has not ended. Where a tool has been applied persistently without achieving its purpose, the case for adding another tool is strong.

This is where Canada has an opening to lead, because no comparable jurisdiction has yet placed “pay-for-slay” programs explicitly into a criminal or sanctions framework. The path forward is narrow and grounded in structures Canada already has.

Parliament can define “pay-for-slay” programs in the Criminal Code, anchored to the existing definition of terrorist activity so that advocacy, protest, and ordinary political expression remain outside its reach, while drawing a clear line between genuine humanitarian assistance and terror incentivization; it can create a single offence for knowingly participating in, facilitating, or contributing to such a program; and it can confirm in both sanctions statutes that involvement in these programs may count as the kind of corruption those laws were built to address.

Legislation that does all of the above requires no displacement of existing law and no novel legal theory: it would simply remove the ambiguity that has left capable tools unused. Canada has long expressed that it stands with the victims of terrorism, but standing with them should mean more than condemning attacks after they happen. It should mean confronting the systems that reward and entrench violence, and saying clearly, in Canadian law, that terrorism will not be permitted to pay.

Sarah Teich is co-founder and CEO of Human Rights Action Group, legal advisor to Secure Canada, and senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. She is the author of the The Economics of Terror: Why Canada should explicitly criminalize pay-for-slay programs.