Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I want to thank our witness, and I also want to thank Amnesty International for the wonderful work they do on promoting and supporting human rights in Canada and throughout the world. And I apologize for being late. I was in another meeting.
I want to take note of some of the issues you had raised. Number one, since we had the UPR report back in February of this year, has there been any progress at all by the government in terms of even trying to attempt to address some of the issues of concern?
Number two, of course we're very much dismayed by the fact that after years of both Liberals and Progressive Conservatives working on the rights of indigenous people, the declaration was not endorsed by this government. And I think that if there are to be any changes in the future, given the fact that it's not a protocol, I'm not sure how Canada would go about doing the endorsement, other than maybe just making a public statement. Maybe you can elaborate on that and how we go about doing that, because I think it is quite important that we do that.
The third question would be does the fact of our federalism sometimes present obstacles and barriers as to how we can implement, for example, certain protocols? The one I'm thinking of is the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture. When I was sort of lobbying for that, the reference was always “Well, we have to deal with our provinces and there are a lot of issues there”. So does that present itself as a barrier to our moving forward with some of these protocols?
Those are the three questions.