Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'm not going to ask a question, because I simply don't have enough time. I'm just going to make a comment for the benefit of the committee.
Parliament can pass and adopt all the legislation it wants on forced labour and child labour, but if the government doesn't enforce that legislation or if it doesn't operationalize the legislation, it's all for naught.
I'd like to use Xinjiang as an example of what I'm talking about. Clearly a genocide is taking place in Xinjiang. Parliament recognized that. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said the birth rate plummeted between 2017 and 2019 by 50%, from 16 births per 1,000 people to eight births per 1,000 people.
Canada and the United States, subsequent to the USMCA, adopted legislation to ban imports using forced labour. Parliament amended the Customs Tariff act on July 1, 2020, to come into conformity with the USMCA. A year later, in June 2021, the United States changed its laws. In the two years since these laws have come into force, the United States has stopped thousands of shipments from Xinjiang from coming into the United States, but not Canada. In fact, there was a single shipment that was stopped at the border, but later released, of cotton products that had come in from the People's Republic of China.
I say all this simply to say that if there is no enforcement of the laws Parliament passes, all of this is for naught. I think the government needs to back up the legislation Parliament adopts with real action to enforce the laws of this country.