Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I want to echo your words about the great, positive, and substantive contribution Mr. Silva made to this committee in the past. Although we have a great makeup of the committee right now, certainly we miss his input and his hard work.
I had the honour to share the platform with Mr. Silva a couple of weeks ago. We were honoured to receive the humanitarian award from the Hamilton Jewish federation. I think he earned it well—much more than I did—for his many, many years of great work to fight anti-Semitism and to support the remembrance of the Holocaust.
I can't say enough about how thrilled I am that not only are we getting the chair in 2013, but that it is former MP Mario Silva who's going to be in that chair.
In his opening remarks, he mentioned some past Canadian acts. Unfortunately, there's the St. Louis incident, and the internment of Jews during the Second World War. These are stains on our past. We need to make sure that we do everything we can to do quite the opposite now, and to make sure that people don't forget the Holocaust. Of course, just as important is that we stop the spread of anti-Semitism, which we saw through testimony when we worked together on the Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism.
I know that was a long interlude, but I just wanted to express in advance my great appreciation for Mr. Silva's chairmanship. I know he'll do good work. That's not to put an extra burden upon him; I'm just very confident in that regard and I'm very happy.
Mr. Silva, there are 31 countries now that are part of the ITF. What efforts are being made in outreach to add to those numbers?