Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Senator Boehm. It's been very interesting to have you here. Thank you very much for being here.
Thank you for that report. I think it was very useful. In fact, I think you did a lot of work that we may be repeating in this study. Thank you for doing that. Certainly, I read it with great interest.
I also want to welcome our friends here into the chamber with us.
One question I wanted to ask came up this weekend. This weekend was obviously a pretty challenging place around the world, but one thing that was on CBC News was that Canada is very quickly becoming irrelevant in sub-Saharan Africa, or totally irrelevant, as the quote in the news said.
We had said there would be an Africa strategy. That has not come out. There was a note that our failure in terms of diplomacy, development and trade in the region meant that we were ceding much of Africa to other countries like China and Russia. I'm wondering if you could comment on that from that diplomatic standpoint.