Mr. Chair, I would respond by saying that, again, there are three components to our work.
There's the advocacy component. That's where I as an ambassador engage foreign governments, whether it's in the country specifically or whether it's engaging their representatives here in Canada. It's interacting with different faith communities, both here in Canada and overseas, around the types of persecution and violence that are meted out against different people of faith. It's also working with our allies, both our bilateral allies, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and also multilaterally through different forums that Canada's involved in.
It's a conjuncture of all of those different types of outreach to advance the message that freedom of religion is a fundamental right. And I should emphasize here that when we understand freedom of religion, we understand it as being fundamentally about human rights. Freedom of religion is a human issue. It's not a theological issue. It helps to know a bit about theology to engage it, but it's fundamentally a human issue and we need to be able to speak to all faith communities. That's at the core of our advocacy.
On the policy side, the other section of our work, there are the tools of diplomacy: statements, meeting with foreign representatives, working with missions abroad to advance religious freedom as part of their outreach.
And then thirdly, the programming side uses our programming funds to advance the office's mandate, as I indicated.