Yes, I agree. One area that I admired in your committee's report on democratic development was the possibility of including more NGO input into government information about China. With respect to these issues that you talk about--the AIDS issue; the violence against women issue, which is a serious and growing issue in China; and the repression issue, and so on--there are a lot of Canadians, particularly Canadians of Chinese origin, who have a lot of expertise in these areas, but currently our Department of Foreign Affairs doesn't have any mechanism for getting genuine input from these people. Unlike the Americans, who provide funding for NGOs and commission them to do studies to provide information into the government policy-making process, Canada doesn't provide support for this resource.
I think it's a resource that we should be making more use of, because those people usually have Chinese language skills, strong people-to-people connections inside China, and they have the capacity to recommend to government policies that could in fact address our concerns in these areas. At present, we're just not drawing on Canadian resources that do exist, and I wish we would be developing mechanisms to do more of that.
Chinese is the third most spoken language in Canada, but when I visit the Canadian embassy in China, there are very few diplomats who are familiar with the Chinese language. They can't read a newspaper. They can't pick up the phone and call their counterpart. I'm puzzled as to why that's the case.