Thank you for your question.
Actually, within Canada over the last one and a half years, ever since the start of the so-called Occupy Central movement, I see that even within Canada, a lot of Canadians, particularly those people who are originally from Hong Kong, are very concerned about what is happening in Hong Kong.
If you go back to before 1997, there was a wave of immigration from Hong Kong to Canada and other parts of the world. After 1997, because people saw that maybe there was not really that much change, they thought that maybe they could go back, but now and over the last year, we are seeing another wave of immigration.
According to one of the figures that I have just obtained from Hong Kong, 21,709 people applied in 2014 for a certificate of “no criminal record”. Of course, this does not imply that all of them will emigrate elsewhere, but at least political uncertainty is being hatched in Hong Kong. A lot of people within Hong Kong are very frustrated with the bad governance of the present Hong Kong SAR government, which is mostly hand-picked by Beijing without any accountability to the citizens in Hong Kong.
Within Canada over the last one and a half years, a lot of young people, as well as first generation immigrants from Hong Kong, have joined forces with us to stage a lot of rallies and public forums, as well as petitions and letters, in order to show their support towards Hong Kong.
We are also joined by Canadians who are not from Hong Kong. For instance, we have joining us the Canadian Federation of Students from the universities, the Canadian Labour Congress, and Unifor. We also have professors and students from academic circles joining us. Very recently, we had three seminars in three universities: one at the University of Waterloo, one at U of T, and then another forum with non-Chinese Canadians. You can see that a lot of interest and a lot of concern have been built up among Canadians.
Globally, there is a network called “Global Solidarity with Hong Kong” that was set up last year. It consists of members from over 60 countries. Every day, people are on Facebook and on Twitter with messages of what could be done all over the world in order to synchronize what kind of support and action we can stage for Hong Kong. Now we have members—I think there are more than 60,000 people—from different countries who even now continue organizing in their own countries.
In Toronto, we have probably one of the most advanced organizations, because we are the only city in the world that joined the PopVote that was organized last June. I see this kind of aspiration among Canadians here, and we hope that the standing committee will also take this into consideration to see what we can do in order to allow our citizens to better understand what is going on in Hong Kong.