Thank you, Chair.
Thank you to both you gentlemen for coming to join us this evening on a most interesting topic.
Professor Evans, before you mentioned Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, I was going to say that there were two names that answer the question as to why there is so much righteous anger at China for its behaviour, because that anger is understandable. Two people are taken, clearly in retribution, who in Canada would be treated legally in relation to a treaty on extradition and under the law, as opposed to being arbitrarily detained. It has led to an awful lot of further examination, of course, and I agree with you that in many cases and for many individuals it has gone too far in terms of hatred and anti-Asian prejudice and acts, and that's deplorable as well.
We're talking about academics here. I wanted to raise a question that bedevils me to some extent and has to do with the Confucius Institutes. They began around 2004 or thereabouts. They were recognized fairly early as being a direct instrument of the Chinese Communist Party operating internationally. In 2014, the CAUT, the Canadian Association of University Teachers, of which I'm sure you're probably members, called upon the universities to not have anything to do with the Confucius Institutes, citing the closing of the Confucius Institute in Sherbrooke, Quebec. The University of Manitoba voted against hosting them out of concerns over political censorship. McMaster cancelled its contracts following an instructor's human rights complaint, etc., and yet they persist to this day in some places. Academic freedom, of course, was the big issue, and is a big issue in academia, persisting to this very day as an extremely important facet of university life.
Why have they persisted? If it's about Chinese language training and culture, as someone pointed out—I think Professor Houlden—we have two million Canadians of Chinese descent. We have 140,000 students here. We can learn about or teach Chinese languages and culture from the people we have. Why is that not happening, and why are universities relying on the Confucius Institutes?