Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and I thank the witnesses and ministry officials for appearing before us.
I think our task here today is to not make it difficult for officials to answer questions and to explain the direction of governments, previous or otherwise, but rather to say that the work before the committee today is to try to find some solutions to address the crisis that's before us. We've had a whole array of witnesses appear before us, with lots of suggestions.
To that end, I want to focus on a couple of things. One is with respect to the issue around tracking.
On the Syrian refugee initiative, at the outset when the government announced the initiative, the identified groups they highlighted were women, children and family, and LGBTQI community members at extreme risk. To that end, my questions were centred especially on the LGBTQI community.
How do we know that we are reaching that goal? We're now learning that we're not able to really identify that very readily. There is, then, a question, and I think a solution has been found with respect to the witnesses before us, about how we can do this better and focus and target this highly vulnerable group. That is by recognizing the countries—I think we were informed that there are about 63 of them across the globe—that have declared people's sexual orientation and gender identity to be illegal. In those instances, we can classify this as a vulnerable group in this sense and therefore target it.
Is this something we can do, as a policy decision going forward, to address this issue of vulnerability?
I'll ask Mr. Manicom, I guess. I'm not sure who would be most appropriate to answer this question.