Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to all our witnesses.
First I want to say, congratulations to you, Mercedes. Your story.... You had the courage to speak up and bring this to the public realm; that's why we are here today. You won your case less than two weeks ago, and you still show up to make the pitch and say why this law needs to change. I can't tell you how much that demonstrates the value that you, and people like you, add to our society and to our country. That is what we are talking about. I don't know how to measure that—not in dollars, not in cents—but I'll tell you that it is worth its weight in gold in terms of what you stand for and the humanity that Mr. Rae talked about earlier, about who we are as Canadians. Thank you for that.
I want to talk about the international law issue, and the fact that Canada.... We say we're back, and it's so good to say we're back. Let's measure, on this policy, how we're back. Canada has made commitments to equality and human rights of people with disabilities in our Canadian Charter of Rights, and we have done so provincially and federally with our human rights legislation. We are also a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, yet we have this law, the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, which states that an individual would be discriminated against based on their different abilities. To that end, for us to say we're back on this score, what does the government need to do?
I'm going to go down the line to everybody. Perhaps you could get your comments on the record for us by way of recommendations—in a short answer, because we have limited time.
We'll start with Mr. Tomlinson.