Thank you very much.
Again, I'm playing the role, I guess, of calling out some of the past actions on this committee. You know, we have heard from the Liberals that there will be due diligence legislation coming forward. It was certainly in the mandate letter for the minister. But we asked the minister to come to this committee and share with us that information, and the minister declined to join us.
We have no due diligence legislation being brought forward at this time. I certainly hope that's something we will see very soon, but I think at this point we have this piece of legislation, which is looking at making sure that forced labour and slave labour are not in supply chains of Canadian companies. That is not a high bar. We have all kinds of tools that we can use to ensure that companies that are not high-risk will not be impacted. We have all kinds of ways to ensure that we are not disproportionately hurting corporations that are not impacted.
I will say it again. Which one of us in this place could look in the face of a woman in Xinjiang and say, “Sorry, we're taking your slave labour, but the company was too small for us to care about you”? That's outrageous. That's an outrageous way to look at due diligence legislation. That's an outrageous way to look at any forced labour legislation.
We speak about the idea of human rights. Human rights don't have a size. Human rights don't have a threshold. Human rights are human rights. I've said it before and I'll say it again. From my perspective, I think of the impacted communities. I think of how in Alberta, for example, we used to have coal mining companies that would slide under the threshold. They'd make sure that they were just under the threshold so that they didn't trigger the federal oversight.
This is setting up legislation that will make sure that organizations and companies slide under that threshold so that they can continue to use forced labour and slave labour and child labour within their supply chains. It's completely inappropriate.