Sure. I'd like to note two things with that concern related to permanent residents.
The most important one is that under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, there is no obligation on other states to allow us to provide services to permanent residents. That is not in the Vienna convention. Therefore, by putting this into legislation, we would raise expectations that we would be very unlikely able to deliver. A lot of the countries that we're speaking about would not recognize Canada's ability. We don't have an ability to access permanent residents.
In terms of the financial cost, it would be significant. I was getting the numbers the other day, just to give an order of magnitude. There are eight million permanent residents in Canada. If we look at that globally and we add that to the number of people we would provide consular services to, you can see the orders of magnitude by which this would increase.
Our consular professionals are amazing and hard-working, all around the world. This absolutely would push the consular services teams, and the teams across the Government of Canada would need to be properly resourced. It would be an order of magnitude that would be quite significant.