Thank you, gentlemen, for your analysis.
As a committee we had an opportunity to visit China, Vietnam, and Indonesia in December. As you know, we're travelling to South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines in May.
I want to start with the issue of human rights, because it's one that I think at least two of you mentioned. It presents a dilemma and a challenge, and we faced that challenge when we were in China, particularly. At all three of our stops, we raised issues of human rights. We had discussions, some more successful than others, on issues of religious freedoms, freedom of expression, democratic values, and political repression. You can imagine how some of those conversations went.
There's an expectation by Canadians that Canada is going to continue to get the message out and be a beacon of human rights and those universal values, and yet, of course, Dr. Boutilier, you mentioned the problem when trying to move ahead in dealing with economic agreements and that sort of thing.
Maybe I'll start with Mr. Grinius, first. How do we align the two? Moving forward, how do we approach, from your perspective, the issues of human rights and the need to be forming and building foundations of trade agreements?