Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to our witnesses for appearing.
This is a very important issue. This Parliament has recognized that a genocide is taking place in Xinjiang against the Uighur and other Turkic Muslim minorities in the region, some 12 million of whom are living in an open-air 24-hour surveillance state. It's an open-air prison, I would add.
The Government of Canada has had laws on the books now for two years that have banned the import of products produced using forced labour, something that was brought in by the government to bring our statutes into compliance with the United States, Mexico, and the Canada Free Trade Agreement. Despite that, products continue to flow in.
Let's just set that aside right now. It seems incongruous that we would ban products produced by companies that are using forced labour but still allow Canadian investors and pension funds, directly or indirectly, to invest in those very companies. To me, that seems to be a bit of a loophole in current Canadian policy.
My first question is this. In the United States, the Americans have listed firms that U.S. investment firms, pension funds and others are banned from buying or selling Chinese equities. Initially, there was a list of about 30 firms. It think it's now been expanded to about 60 firms where American investors and pension funds are prohibited from buying or selling shares of these Chinese equities.
Do you think that is a model to be followed, that the Government of Canada could list equities of these firms in the People's Republic of China that are on the banned list? Would that be a way to affect the policy, or is there a better policy solution than that?
That's for all of the witnesses.