On hostage-taking, as you know, in the post-war period the number of incidents that have occurred has been tremendous. For the period that I was there dealing with them, I was told when I retired that I dealt with 125 hostage situations, and not one Canadian died. I operated on the principle that in these situations, ransoms are going to be paid.
Now, there have been international agreements by the G7, other groups and that sort of thing that say ransom should not be paid. It's absolute nonsense. Every member of the G7 and just about every other country in the world, when faced with hostage situations, works out some sort of an arrangement, in effect, to get their people back.
We had a very tragic situation a few years ago in the southern Philippines. Those two people should never have died.
If you take the situation more recently, as far as China was concerned, the two Canadians in jail in China were hostages in every sense of the word. In effect, it was well within the power of the Canadian government to work out arrangements for their return.
We've done it in other situations, but for some reason or another we have lost the ability to do this, or the people who work the system will not take the flexibility that's available and get Canadians back alive. It's quite doable. Every other country is able to do it.