Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I thank the witness for being here as well.
The committee has been struggling with the whole issue of a genuine engagement between Canada and China on the issue of human rights, and whether the bilateral human rights dialogue can play a bigger role in Canadian foreign policy in China. How you go about this dialogue is very important. Certainly there are those who argue that the dialogue is not working and we should just abandon it and go back to square one. If there is some measure of success, we'd certainly like to hear what it is, so we can assess whether this is working or not.
The whole issue to me is how do you render the universal principles of human rights effective at the local level--how do you go about doing that without also engaging local governments, authorities, and NGOs? The problem is that our dialogue with China or any other country is always government to government. We talk about bilateral relationships, and it's the federal government versus their government.
At times when we talk about human rights it seems to them that we're lecturing them. But we're lecturing a regime, not the whole population. Obviously there are many people in China who have genuine concerns about human rights and want to advance the cause of human rights. We're not taking issue with those people. But how do you go about engaging those individuals so we can bring about effective change? I'm not sure. It's a big question in my mind, but I really believe we cannot have a genuine dialogue without those local engagements. Otherwise this is all going to be useless, because at the government-to-government level it's not working.
Maybe Paul Evans can answer that.