The importance of training diplomats has been recognized by a number of countries including Canada in terms of the area of religious freedom. This comes back to something that not only our offices but also many of my colleagues have observed when they've been engaged in postings overseas or even through their work here in Ottawa. When they look out into these countries, the vast majority of countries in the world have a very strong religious sense. Religion and religious faith dominate or have a place not only within a perceived cultural dialogue but also within a socio-economic political dialogue, whereby religion and religious faith have a very prominent role within society.
We live in fairly secularized societies. There's been a recognition, I think, by my colleagues and by me, and also by colleagues in other countries in the west that if we don't understand this reality, these countries where religion plays a dominant role—a lot of the time for good but also sometimes for ill—then we risk developing a very serious diplomatic blind spot. So, from the beginning of the office's existence, we have engaged in developing training modules for our diplomats.
At our first full-day training session, which was last year, we sought to highlight the importance of advancing religious freedom within the context of international human rights, and also in the Canadian context of advancing pluralism and supporting democracy and democratic development in the world. We hope to expand that training to a two-day program this year, since it was oversubscribed to last year in Foreign Affairs, to give diplomats a chance to engage in various case studies. This year I think one of them will be on the situation in Iraq and Syria, and how you confront very entrenched conflicts that are often not simply a product of the current environment but that also have some historical antecedents that are important for us to understand.
Each year I also speak to outgoing heads of missions. We discuss religious freedom and how to approach it when we engage in countries where there are serious violations of religious freedom. Our allies, including the Americans, the British, and those in a number of other countries, now have in place training programs that recognize the need to equip diplomats even with the language to talk about religion, and not to be afraid about engaging religion, even though we're often conditioned in our own sort of secular society to not talk about it. In these countries we need to have that understanding, so we certainly see training and enabling our diplomats to engage in this way as being very crucial.