Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to begin by going back to Mr. Sorenson's comments about not blaming previous governments and not getting into pointing fingers. One of the things I find hard to balance with that, though, is the fact that Canada itself has not signed on to the optional protocol on torture. But that's kind of an aside.
The balance between trade and human rights is a very terrible place to find ourselves. I want to thank you for coming here today and expressing your strong concerns on the issues.
I want to ask two things. First of all, we have Mr. Celil, who is a Canadian citizen being held in China. We have our Prime Minister, who made his remarks the other day, and we're still not clear about what took place when they actually met. And I'm not going to critique that one way or another. But I am concerned when you raise the 30,000 NGOs. Would they not, number one, be seen as subversive by the government the moment they start to become active? That's difficult.
I'll go beyond that, though, because we're really talking about the dialogue here today. What would you think of a proposal that said the dialogue is suspended, that we bring together union groups, that we bring together civil society, NGOs, and members of this committee to consider the dialogue's future? That's number one.
Number two, when the dialogue resumes, it would become accountable to this committee, as opposed to the direction now, because there are more political teeth in what we do.