Thank you, Chair, and thanks to the committee for allowing this motion to be discussed, debated, and voted on. I have a couple of quick things to sum up.
I do want to respond to Mr. Abbott's questions--not the one on the embassy; I think there was agreement that it wasn't really connected to this motion. It's an interesting inquiry, but not dependent upon the motion being passed or not. We can still look into it.
Regarding his question about why the steering committee may have considered and passed the other questions, it was to have a full scope of the issue--not of Mr. Abdelrazik himself, but of the issue, if you will, of how we got here--to understand the mechanics of this. I've asserted at committee here what I think the mechanics are, and the steering committee wanted to probe a bit more. I think that's entirely valid, so that as a committee we understand the policies and how they work. That's separate from the motion, which is asking...well, it's related, but as my father used to say, it's not close, it's adjacent. I think it's not something that we are depending upon passing the motion to have Mr. Abdelrazik come.... It's something we can understand, as a committee, in terms of the policies. I think there was a need for the steering committee to have a deeper background on what all of the issues are around this policy.
I've stated numerous times, from the most recent past, that according to the travel ban that's in place, there is a way for foreign nationals to be returned. In fact, I quoted today for the record, for my friend the parliamentary secretary, that the person who has oversight of this committee stated, for the record, that it's up to each country and they can ask for their foreign nationals to come home. So I wanted to state this for the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of International Cooperation.
I want to finish, Mr. Chairman, by saying that this motion, as passed, would do what we all hope, on this side at least, which we haven't been able to see done, and that is to have Mr. Abdelrazik come home. Absolutely, I agree. I'm not hiding anything there. Most importantly for us, it's to hear from him directly what his situation is in terms of concerns around the legal case and whether or not he'd be able to state certain things in front of the committee. I'll leave that up to his lawyer, but I'd simply make the observation that his legal case was all about his returning home, so I would suggest that it might not be as big an issue as the parliamentary secretary might suggest.
In sum, Mr. Chair, what we're doing here today is passing a motion to have a Canadian return home, to hear from him directly, and hopefully to do it forthwith, as quickly as possible.
Thank you.