Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to my colleague for his great question.
This bill is about making sure we can close some of these loopholes. Think about the definition in the bill for transnational repression. It is about ensuring that our communities here.... Over the years, we've heard from members of the Persian, Taiwanese and Hong Kong communities, as well as from the Falun Dafa and the Uyghurs, about how they have been targeted by other states that have come here and essentially tried to coerce them, or worse, with physical intimidation.
We need to make sure that.... There are individuals doing that on the ground here, as we saw with the Chinese police stations, which the Communist Party of China used to intimidate their nationals here who are now Canadian citizens. In the case of Michael Chong, one of our colleagues, his family in Hong Kong was potentially targeted, as discovered by CSIS and the RCMP.
We must strengthen the regime we have to ensure that we can protect Canadians who are here by birth or who have chosen to become Canadians. These individuals deserve our utmost protection, so let's hold to account those individuals going after foreign nationals here in Canada.