Critics of Ottawa’s lacklustre kidnap response protocols were disappointed Monday when the prime minister answered a question none of them asked.

Rather than addressing a litany of shortcomings detailed in a recent investigation by the Toronto Star into the government’s handling of overseas kidnaps, Justin Trudeau fell back on a boilerplate talking point about the importance of not paying ransom.

He was asked during a year-end news conference if he had any regrets in how Ottawa handled the cases of John Ridsdel and Robert Hall. The two Canadians were murdered by the militant Abu Sayyaf Group earlier this year in the Philippines when the group’s ransom demands were not met. A review is underway.

“I think people understand, and the Canadians I’ve spoken with across the country in the months following certainly understand, that any other position would not just provide source of significant funds to violent terrorists intent on causing more harm and taking more lives, but it would also endanger further the lives of any Canadian citizen who works, travels, or lives outside of our borders,” Trudeau said.

And yet neither the Ridsdel nor Hall families — nor any of the more than 50 relatives of other Canadian hostages, witnesses, government, military, intelligence officials and private security consultants that were interviewed by the Star for the eight-part Held Hostage series — ever once suggested Ottawa should pay ransoms to terrorist groups holding Canadians.

Instead, many complained about a leaderless government response — one bogged down by turf wars, bureaucratic bungling and political inertia — that left them in the dark, traumatized anew by Canada’s handling of their cases.

“He is totally missing the point,” Bonice Thomas, Hall’s sister said Monday, in response to Trudeau’s comments. “That has never ever been on the table. There was no expectation that the government would pony up any money … the real question, succinctly, is, ‘What did you do?’

“That lets us put it on the table, and learn from our mistakes and move on.”

CBC News, in its own investigation into the government’s handling of the Philippine kidnapping, found similar problems to the Star’s examinations of hostage-takings since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

As other countries have refined their policies in the years since 9/11, Ottawa has lagged dangerously behind.

Canada’s existing approach stands in particularly stark contrast to that of the United States, which last year acknowledged the plight of hostage families with a sweeping policy overhaul. Among the U.S. changes, new protocols aimed at keeping families better informed and a reorganization of government resources “to ensure the U.S. government is doing all that it can to recover Americans taken hostage overseas and is being responsive to the families.”

The U.S. Department of Justice simultaneously removed the threat of criminal prosecution from relatives of hostages who come in direct contact with kidnappers — a threat that still looms over Canadian families to this day.

Australia, in a similar review of its hostage protocols in 2011, found that all of its government agencies needed to exercise “greater care, consideration and diligence in the way they deal with the distressed families of a person kidnapped and held for ransom overseas.”

The Canadian government has yet to signal any interest in any similarly in-depth review, despite a growing body of evidence that suggests the next family of a Canadian kidnapped abroad will suffer needlessly without one.

Critics of Canada’s kidnap policies say families of hostages are left to deal with an unfair burden — being provided with so little information that they are often left fending for themselves, while also asked to make life-or-death decisions as they are forced to deal with the kidnappers directly.

“Had it not been for the constraints placed on our family as we co-operated with the Canadian government, my daughter Amanda Lindhout would not have been forced to suffer extra months of extreme deprivation and abuse,” Lindhout’s mother, Lorinda Stewart, said Monday in response to Trudeau’s statement.

“When the ‘release’ from the government came after a year, we were able to secure her freedom after only four months by hiring a private security company and raising the ransom ourselves.”

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Stewart said she trusted the RCMP as they assured her they were working to release Lindhout from her Somali captors in 2008, and discouraged her from trying to meet the kidnappers’ demands. She was stunned when the Mounties suddenly walked away from the case a year later, telling her they could do no more. Stewart pushed forward on her own, ultimately raising funds to hire a private security firm to secure her daughter’s freedom.

A senior government spokesperson said that while no policy changes were being considered, Trudeau is considering a meeting with relatives of hostages in the new year to hear their concerns directly.

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