I'll just offer some general remarks, and then I'll turn it over to my colleague Mark Berman to talk about the specifics.
Certainly we agree. This is one of the areas that have been of particular focus to us, family-related cases, cases of child custody and in some cases child abduction. We've seen a significant increase in the number of these cases as Canadians increasingly live abroad in different countries.
We had, for example, last year, 886 family-related cases that we were dealing with. It's a significant number, not significant in light of the 265,000, but for us, it's a significant number when you think that those are all individual cases that require our attention. We've put in place extra focus, extra training, and a number of tools—I referred to one in my opening statement about how to assess the well-being of children—but we're operating in foreign legal environments where often we have different legal frameworks.
The Hague convention provides for the signatory states, of which Canada is one, formalized mechanisms that allow countries to speak to each other and have points of contact and formalized processes for working to resolve these cases. But not all states are members of that convention, indeed many of the countries we deal with aren't. We have to find individualized solutions.
I'll turn it over to Mark, who leads the consular unit, including the child protection unit, to speak to that.