Mr. Speaker, that is a legitimate and a good question. It is an important question to have some dialogue about.
I want to be clear that there are many countries whose human rights record I have criticized in this House. I have criticized China's human rights record; I have criticized Saudi Arabia's human rights record. I have not advocated breaking off diplomatic relations with those countries. There is a case for wisdom and strategy in terms of how we approach specific cases in order to maximize our effectiveness.
Iran is a special case for a number of reasons. One of them is that Iran does not play by the normal rules of diplomatic respect. There are multiple cases in which foreign embassies have been attacked inside Iran in response to criticism that has come from other countries over their record. How we do have a dialogue with Iran if it is the kind of country where there is a real threat to the safety of our diplomatic staff every time we speak out? That is not a reality in many other countries, but that is a situation we have seen in Iran, the repeated attacking of diplomatic properties and personnel.
The Conservative government broke off diplomatic relations with Iran at a time when there was a clear concern about security. We realized that we could not in fact guarantee the security of staff. In addition to all of these other issues, now would be the wrong time to reward Iran with the re-establishment of those relations especially in light of that.
I will just wrap up my response with this. Of course there are cases where we have somebody in Iran we want to get out, and the Iranian government has been unhelpful. However, we had the same problems previously. We had the case that has just happened, Professor Kavous Seyed-Emami, who was killed in an Iranian prison. We had the case of Zahra Kazemi at a time when Canada did have diplomatic relations with Iran.
The way in which Iran uses diplomatic relations to threaten Canadians and their embassy as a clandestine mechanism for exerting power outside of normal channels makes Iran a special case, and certainly, in any event, having had diplomatic relations broken off, now is not the time to reward Iran with that re-establishment.