Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I really appreciate our two guests bringing their expertise here today.
I'll begin with Mr. Larocque. Of course, Mr. Grossman, if you'd like to respond as well, I'd be pleased to hear from you.
I presume that both of you gentlemen are familiar with Senator LeBreton's bill, Bill S-7. There are similarities here. I think it would have been a more effective bill had they seen fit to add what Professor Cotler had in his, in regard to genocide, crimes against humanity, and so on. I think Canadians as a whole would be quite shocked once they came to understand the comfort, perhaps, that we can say we give to other countries where the leaders are involved with torture. I'm sure they'd be shocked and there would be a certain level of disbelief.
One of the things that is a concern, though, is getting into an area where in legislation we start talking about designating terrorist countries. Then we get into who's a terrorist and who's not a terrorist and, of course, certain western nations tend to be selective in their choices. As an example, I was in Saudi Arabia in 1979 for six months, and I saw people there who were subjected to torture by their own government for a variety of reasons.
Think about the fact that the people involved with 9/11 came out of Saudi Arabia, but we're not saying that Saudi Arabia is a terrorist place, and then again we have thousands of people who go to Cuba each year, and countries choose to designate Cuba as a terrorist state. There's a balancing that has to be done. I mean, if you talk about the renditions out of the United States to Syria, it's very troubling.
How would you reconcile this situation? Or should we be designating terrorist states at all?