Thank you both for being here and making your presentations before our committee. Certainly we appreciate your being here for this very important study that we're looking at this morning.
Very quickly, I want to say that, as a father, I'm sitting here and I get an e-mail from my daughter. She's in grade 9, and because of a couple of assignments that she didn't do so well on, her mother has threatened to not let her to go on her school camping trip. She responds by saying,“That's torture, Dad. That's torture.” So people have different interpretations of what that word means. I don't give you that to diminish the work that you're doing.
We do recognize that there are many sad cases of countries and places where there is torture of prisoners, and it's very real. Canada wants to be certain that we do all we can to alleviate it, and to make sure that people don't go through those things.
Madam Pate, you mentioned that you were somewhat embarrassed by the Canadian government's not acting earlier. I think our guest in Geneva perhaps had a partial answer to that, which was that we have had three governments in the past four years. When this came at the end of 2002, into 2003, there were issues going on, and there probably still are, and I'm glad to hear that our minister has responded very positively to the principle of what this protocol does and is looking at it.
My question would be on the federal and provincial requirements. Are there any requirements needed in order to implement this optional protocol? As far as you know, and maybe this is the question to be asked of the minister, have there been ongoing discussions with—and I'm thinking of when we talk and relate to the penitentiaries and things that are going on, because mention was made of the ladies' penitentiary in a number of different places—the provinces or territories on the implementation of this protocol? It's more than just signing on to something. Is there a courtesy that should be extended to our provinces in a case like this?