Okay. Thank you.
My understanding is that there are 1,000 Saudi visa trainees in Canada. Seventy thousand dollars times 1,000 is, I believe, $70 million, which, on the scale of the Government of Canada, is not very much money, so I want to tell you a story about why I feel personally scandalized by this.
I'm critical of Chrystia Freeland for many things, but in August 2018, she called for the release of human rights activists in Saudi Arabia who'd been imprisoned for, like, five years because they wanted women to have the right to drive. Then Saudi Arabia pulled funding for these visa trainees and said that it was going to take its trainees back. I was teaching at the Queen's University faculty of medicine at that time, and the administration lost their minds because of the dearth of funding that this would cause.
A few months after that, Jamal Khashoggi was brutally murdered and dismembered. He was a Washington Post journalist who was murdered with a bone saw, and that sort of repression continues in Saudi Arabia to this day. This summer, they just executed a journalist for criticizing the government in tweets.
I personally felt morally scandalized that the faculty of medicine that I was at was lobbying the government to get this money back from a brutally repressive dictatorship. I wonder if you have reflections on that.
Do you think that receiving this amount of money from a brutal, repressive dictatorship morally compromises faculties of medicine in Canada?