Thank you, Chair.
I want to get this in, Minister. According to a report in the Associated Press, UN operations in Syria have dealt heavily with regime-affiliated human rights abusers. The report suggests that almost half of the procurement contracts involve companies involved in or profiting from human rights abuses.
Incredibly to me, about one-quarter of contracts went to companies owned or partially owned by individuals directly sanctioned by us or our allies. We have a situation where, on the one hand, our development assistance has stringent conditions associated with it for Canadian organization, which limit our ability to do good work in the context of Afghanistan, as we've talked about, but at the same time, we're giving money to the UN and other multilateral organizations with serious corruption problems, and also they are doing business, procuring goods, from one of the world's most heinous regimes and its enablers.
We need to put a stop to this. I want to ask this specifically: Will you commit to withdrawing funds from organizations, UN-affiliated or otherwise, that don't have acceptable human rights standards? How will you seek to challenge these kinds of procurement practices in the context of Pakistan and in other contexts, to make sure we are no longer, through our contributions to the UN, giving money to people we're supposed to be sanctioning?