No. If we're talking about company employees and security guards and state security forces--those who are deployed to protect the company--committing serious abuses, the idea is not that a Canadian company should build a prison and throw into it all those who are guilty of these abuses. The idea is that Canada's corporate citizens ought to be held to account for the behaviour of their own employees and the security forces they rely on for protection. They can't simply say that they don't know what they're doing or that they don't have any capacity to investigate it.
All this bill says--all anyone at this table is arguing--is that you can't advance the argument that a company working overseas can employ an armed private security force and then simply throw up its hands and say there's nothing it can do when abuses are committed by those forces.
I also wanted to respond very quickly to one of Mr. Nash's points, the idea that maybe these standards are too high and there needs to be more consultation about where they should be.
I wonder if you could find a major Canadian company operating overseas that doesn't claim that it already adheres to every single standard set down in this bill--not that it would like to or that it tries to, but that it actually does and that it succeeds in doing so. Why, then, are these standards so vague or impossible to live up to in the context of this legislation if, in the context of their PR and the things they say to their shareholders, it seems very clear and easy to say that they're already meeting all of these things anyway?