Thank you for being here.
I can say that on behalf of the foreign affairs committee, which I chair, when we put this committee in place, we recognized that since the number of people applying to attend were so many, this committee was going to be very important.
Again I underscore what Mr. Silva stated: we work together in a very non-partisan way, by consensus, and I think all parties recognize the importance of the study on China.
Much of your Rights and Democracy report deals with quantification, or quantifying exactly what's going on. I recognize that right in your report it says: "Despite the usefulness of indicators and benchmarks”, both human rights, “there are considerable drawbacks to using this approach for a process such as a bilateral dialogue on human rights. Specifically, many human rights outcomes are not quantifiable.”
All the questions so far have kind of dealt with how we quantify those things and how we recognize them. But my question is, are there other countries, are there other international models, which come from a principled position, that are doing it better than we are? Are there certain countries dealing with China and perhaps with policy points that have a different approach, as compared to what Canada has in policy and how we deal with this?
I'm just kind of learning some of what came out of the last answer with regard to CIDA. CIDA puts money into areas where human rights issues can be addressed, but they also put money into other parts of China where there are real needs. There's real poverty and things like that. Do you cut programming in those areas because of human rights violations? Do you turn a blind eye to people who are using those programs a lot?