Certainly, and I also want to add a note to what you said about what will happen when these individuals return home. I think one of the more concrete things a lot of members of Parliament can do, since we have their itinerary, is to send a message to the Canadian embassy saying these individuals are arriving on this date and asking them to make sure that they are not detained and that their passports are not confiscated. I think the embassy should send a human rights officer to the airport. In the past we've worked with the United States government to do this, and doing this has ensured their safety.
To your second point about what more can be done, I think that interestingly enough the Vietnamese government wants to be part of the global community. It wants to play by global rules. I think for that, you can set specific human rights benchmarks when you're talking trade. It doesn't have to be the grand gesture of legal reform. Certainly we want legal reform, but it's very hard to press on that. I think asking for prisoner release is something that they're amenable to and they're very susceptible to. I think that when world leaders come together and there's a significant enough voice, they want to save face, they want to be able to give....
These cases are winnable and we've seen that in the past. There just have to be more voices. There are certainly a number of cases for which, if we press hard enough and if there are enough MPs, the Vietnamese government is willing to give up in order to, say, jump on the TPP.
Apart from the TPP, there are instances of the ministry of foreign affairs meeting with their counterparts in Vietnam and talking about even smaller trade or defence agreements. Mentioning these cases makes a huge impact, because then the officials will talk to each other and say the Canadian government actually pays attention, so maybe we should reconsider case X or case Y, or maybe we should consider moving them to a better prison or consider getting them legal counsel.
I think those are the small steps you can take along with, of course, pressing for overall legal reform, changes to the constitution, and more freedom of expression. But if you offered them smaller cases, I think they'd be willing to bite on those.
