Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I'd like to thank you all for being here.
Thank you for being here, Minister. I have a few comments I want to make first, and then I'll ask you a series of questions.
First of all, I want to say that I stand in solidarity with our colleague Michael Chong. To know that that diplomat is still here is appalling. To hear you say things like you're assessing it makes me very concerned that you're not taking this as seriously as you should.
That leads into my second comment. We've been meeting, as I'm sure many people around this table have, with human rights defenders, church groups, faith groups and international development organizations. Many of them have let us know that despite the fact that they have reached out to you, in some cases multiple times, they rarely hear back from your department. I am worried about that. I'm worried that it's a trend and that you're not responding to organizations. I just want to flag that for you. I know you won't be able to respond to that right now.
To start, I will ask you a few questions about Canada's arms sales. You said to Mr. Sarai that defending human rights is “part of our DNA”. I met today with Amnesty International from Peru. They were talking about the challenges that are happening in Peru. Canada continues to sell arms to Peru. We continue to sell arms to Saudi Arabia. We continue to sell arms to Israel. We continue to sell arms to Colombia. You have told me in the past that this wouldn't be the case and that you would make sure we were living up to the obligations under the Arms Trade Treaty.
To me, Minister, unless you have a vastly different definition of what the Arms Trade Treaty means, it doesn't look like you're living up to that. Can you tell us why?