Thank you, Chair.
Hello to everyone. It's the first time I've been here in quite some time. It's as lively as usual.
Welcome to our guests.
To start, for the record I would like to say that tomorrow being December 3--I'm from Newfoundland and Labrador--we're swearing in our first-ever female premier. I don't know if this makes history or not, though I suspect it does, but there are three political parties in Newfoundland, and all three--NDP, Liberal, and Progressive Conservative--are led by women.
[Applause]
I talk to people about it, and a lot of people, instead of saying “way to go” or “congratulations”, say, “About time”.
I don't know if my question is germane to the material in front of me, but it's something that has always occurred to me about language. It's not so much about language in describing a policy, but language about condemnation.
Just two days ago, I read an article about a woman who was executed in Iran. What I noticed was that the language to condemn this was just not strong enough to me. I found that some of the countries, including our own.... Is our country as strong as others in condemning these actions? It seems to me that the charges that were brought upon this person--which she was convicted of and died of--were the result of situations of relationships she had with men, being subservient to men, and so on and so forth, for whatever reason--religion or anything else.
It just struck me that it just wasn't harsh enough in our condemnations, and to me, that's a question of language, not just the action that followed. Could you comment on that? Is that something you've looked at within a study or informally?