You can ascribe any number of trigger warnings to Monday’s gruesome news involving two Canadian hostages in the Philippines.

A deadline arrived. A ransom did not. And thus did the militants of Abu Sayyaf make real the threat to behead expat Calgarian John Ridsdel in a manner so repugnant as to be unworthy of repeating here.

A trigger of devastation for his many friends and family, including none other than former Ontario premier Bob Rae, who knew Ridsdel, 68, since college. When the news broke, a deeply anguished Rae disclosed his months of ultimately fruitless involvement in back-channel efforts to negotiate freedom for his friend.

A trigger of deepening dread for the well-being of fellow Canadian captive Robert Hall, 50, who remains in the grip of the Jihadist group, alongside a Norwegian man and a Filipino woman. All were snatched up last September in an audacious raid from a holiday resort in the southern Philippine island of Samal. Random hostages, by all accounts.

And a trigger of memory, we can’t help but think, to the very different story that played out seven years ago, when two Canadian diplomats in nearly identical distress — Robert Fowler and his assistant, Louis Guay — were released after five months in the captivity of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

Canadian policy then was, as it is now, seemingly carved in stone — no ransom for terror. Former prime minister Stephen Harper was explicit about it in the case of Fowler and Guay. His government, he insisted, did not pay.

Two years later, the question of how Fowler and Guay gained freedom popped up unexpectedly in the massive trove of classified U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks. The note in question described how a senior Libyan official vented frustration at his U.S. counterpart in Tripoli, remarking that Al Qaeda was drawing strength from the flow of cash for hostages, “including the two Canadian officials who were recently released in return for a ransom payment.”

And then, two years later, in May of 2013, we learned the price — $1.1 million — that was paid for the release of Fowler and Guay. It was embedded in an astonishing letter obtained by The Associated Press, in which Al Qaeda rebukes a senior operative for “blatant inadequacy,” including trading the high-value Canadian hostages for so “meagre” a price, “rather than walking alongside us in the plan we outlined.”

We have long known that the stone many countries carve their no-ransom policies upon is surprisingly elastic. Third parties, conveniently, can enable indirect cash flows in such a way that all tracks are covered. France, to the great consternation of Washington, has, by many accounts, played the hostage game to near-perfection.

But that is likely of zero comfort to Harper’s successor, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who faced the cameras Monday, expressing outrage over “an act of cold-blooded murder” and vowing to pursue those responsible. Whatever negotiating space (if any) existed when two Canadians were alive seems smaller now.

“It’s a tough spot for the prime minister. Obviously, he cannot publicly disavow government policy over this one event, as horrible as it is. The argument has long been that if you pay a ransom you incentivize future kidnappings,” said Arjun Chowdhury, a University of British Columbia political scientist.

“My understanding is that even the U.S. has negotiated to release some captives on occasion, despite the rhetoric about lines in the sand. But in this context, it becomes very difficult because the feelers from intelligence and diplomatic channels would already have already been tried.”

Will Plowright, a PhD candidate in conflict management at UBC, agrees: “At this point, attempting the back channel — facilitating a ransom payment but hiding it from the public — is extremely high risk.

“I wouldn’t say hopeless, there is always hope. The best thing is to continue pursuing contact and working with allies in the region, especially the Philippines, which knows the terrain and players better than anyone. This particular armed group, Abu Sayyaf, has been doing this for a long time. Sometimes they get paid, sometimes not.”

Who is Abu Sayyaf?

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Assassins. Kidnappers. Bombers. Extortionists. Separatists. Occupants of the murky space between crime and ideology. Jihadists, yes. But Jihadists who aspire not to global domination but to fistfuls of cash, ostensibly in service of a violent campaign for a breakaway Muslim state in the predominantly Catholic Philippines. Welcome to the violent world of Abu Sayyaf, the hyper-local terror group centred in and around the southeastern Philippine Islands of Jolo and Basilan that traces its roots to the early 1990s and is responsible for Monday’s horrific beheading of Canadian hostage James Ridsdel. Abu Sayyaf fighters are thought to number in the hundreds, a tiny guerrilla army compared to the thousands of Daesh militants holding sway across parts of Iraq and Syria.

Should Canada have paid the ransom?

Some countries pay ransom. Some don’t. And that difference raises a haunting counterfactual: Would John Ridsdel be alive today if he were French?

Still in the grip of Abu Sayyaf

Amid grief for slain Canadian hostage John Ridsdel, Ottawa’s attention remains focused on his fellow Canadian captive Robert Hall, 50, who was seized in the same raid on a holiday resort in the southern Philippine island of Samal last September. Hall was last seen 10 days ago in a dire Abu Sayyaf ransom video, speaking directly to the camera as militants brandish guns and hold a knife to his throat, demanding cash payment of 300 million Philippine pesos ($8.3 million). “My specific appeal is to the Canadian government, who I know has the capacity to get us out of here,” Hall said under obvious duress. “I’m wondering what they’re waiting for.”

To pay or not to pay

The controversial issue of ransom payment flares often — but was especially intense two years ago when four French journalists walked free from Syria after being held for months by Daesh militants. The French government denied any such payment, but reports in Le Monde and Agence France-Presse suggested otherwise, suggesting money had covertly changed hands. Other investigations, including a New York Times probe of high-profile hostage takings, pointed to France as the single largest source for an estimated $125 (U.S.) million in payments to terrorist groups since 2008. The U.S. and U.K., in particularly, have sharply opposed the practice, demanding anti-ransom consensus.

Amanda Lindhout

Canadian journalist Lindhout and Australian photographer Nigel Brennan endured a 15-month ordeal after their August, 2008, kidnapping in war-torn Somalia. Their families lobbied their respective (and reluctant) governments for more than a year to help meet a $2.5-million ransom demand. Eventually the families turned to the U.K. security firm AKE, which employed murky back channels to deliver what a reported $600,000 payment to secure their release. A subsequent RCMP criminal probe lasted years, ultimately leading to the 2015 arrest of a Somali man, Ali Omar Ader, who stands accused of playing a key role in negotiating on behalf of their captors.

Cash for pirates

November, 2009, saw the release of a Spanish tuna trawler and its crew of 36 after a month-long ordeal in the Indian Ocean at the hands of Somali pirates. The trade-off: a cash payment in the range of $4 million, according to the Somali captors. Then Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriquez Zapatero declined to directly address the question of ransom, saying, the “government did what it had to do, it worked within the law in co-operation with the ship’s owner and the family members of the crew.”

Christian Peacemakers in Iraq

Military action to free hostages often ends in failure — and sometimes with the death of the captives themselves. But this was dramatically not the case on March 23, 2006, when a team of British, Canadian, U.S. and Iraqi soldiers successfully freed three humanitarian aid workers in Iraq, including James Loney of Toronto and former Montrealer Harmeet Singh Sooden. The Canadians, part of a Christian Peacemakers Team, held hostage for four months by the previously unknown Swords of Righteousness Brigade, lived to tell the story. A fourth hostage, U.S. citizen Tom Fox, didn’t make it. His body was discovered earlier in the month in Baghdad.