Thank you. The point I wanted to make was related to some of the discussion that came forth regarding the duty to protect and the application of the Canadian charter extraterritorially or in foreign space.
I heard one witness say that those rights should follow Canadians wherever they go, or that was the way it appeared to come across. I heard another witness say that's a nice notion, in response to that. It seemed to me there was a little bit of discussion going on, even amongst the witnesses, that it is a nice notion and we wish it were the case. I heard that from another witness here.
So if we are going to come to some conclusion in providing direction to the government, we need to discuss this more thoroughly than we have had the opportunity to do at this point.
When you look at our consular services being provided abroad to Canadians, there are more than 142,000 active consular cases around the world on an average day, 686 new cases in 2008-09, and some 1,600 Canadians receiving emergency assistance in more than 26 separate incidents. We are resolving most of these incidents very successfully. Thank goodness for the good work that our consular agencies are doing around the world, trying to resolve these issues when they do come up.
The kinds of issues that are very egregious are a small number of cases in high-risk situations in states, by and large, that don't respect law, or no law as we know it in Canada. So I have a little challenge with that.
I had another point I wanted to raise, but it got shuffled around a little bit.
I think the last point I would make at this point in the discussion is that when Canadians are travelling abroad, they are still subject to the laws of the nations they arrive in. I think Canadians ought to take that into consideration when they travel abroad to places where there are questionable practices and where they know there are high risks. We have to consider that the citizens themselves need to have some responsibility for going into high-risk situations and be aware of those risks and the limits of the government's capacity to provide protection in every instance.
Mr. Chair, at this point I will surrender the floor, but I'm sure I will have other comments to make on this.