Fortunately, I ate before coming here, Mr. Chair. And I have a plane to catch, so I have to leave in about eight minutes.
You know, I'm known in my party for being a Timmies guy. I talk to people in the food courts of Eastgate Square in Hamilton, or I go to our Timmies and I sit and talk with them about some of the issues that are very troubling.
To give an example, you talked about the various conventions--the protocol to the convention against torture, which Canada shepherded into the UN and then all of a sudden stood back from; and the rights of the child, vis-à-vis the Omar Khadr case. I was just reading in the newspaper about Mohamed Harkat and some of the evidence against him that the U.S. has suddenly decided....
When you look at those together, you see the shadow of 9/11. Rather than say a government here is to blame, or a government there is to blame, there was a reaction at that point in time.... Of course, we all remember the United States, and everybody on the steps singing together as if.... Well, I won't start too far down that road.
Alex, you're very right to say it's a thorny issue. The thing that's amazing, though, with the Timmies crowd, is that they believe we have the best human rights on the face of the earth. And I agree, that's what we should be striving for.
One of the things that has come out of your commentary today, which I think is very striking, and I haven't it heard before--we've had a couple of days of hearings previously on this--is the need for a minister in charge. I think you may have just opened the door to the one idea.
Right now, with the continuing committee we have a case of mid-level officials doing, we presume, the due diligence within the frame that they've been given. But if you have a minister that we can turn to for leadership....
I'm not in the blame game here. I'm as disappointed as everybody. When you read the UPR.... I made a point last time, and this time again, of talking about some of the countries that made comments about Canada. They are good friends: UK, Denmark, Italy, Chile, the Netherlands, Czech Republic, Austria, and Sweden. As you've indicated..and we could get discouraged, and I can understand that, with the fact that so many of these people have raised these issues before.
We have a government today that talks about accountability. In fairness to the government members of this committee, they were in agreement to having these hearings. I want to stress that, because I think that's important going forward.
I would ask about what you call systemic barriers within the continuing committee. The reason I ask is that we hope to hear from them. Are there any systemic barriers that you see, where those walls could and should be taken down?