I think there are various measures that we can take and avenues we can pursue, so obviously, working with like-minded partners. In terms of gathering evidence, while our ambassador has not yet been able to visit Xinjiang, certainly members of the embassy in Beijing have been able to visit, though their visits are quite constrained, both by security measures and it's fair to say, by the concerns of individuals in Xinjiang that, if they speak to foreign diplomats, they might suffer as a consequence.
I think you'll have noticed that my opening remarks referred extensively to UN committee reports and UN authorities. That's because they are really a credible source of information from a whole variety of sources, including confidential information that comes to them, whose confidentiality they must protect.
We're looking at all avenues for collecting information. Obviously, the most important is to get some data from Chinese authorities. One of the things that has concerned us has been that, until very recently, they wouldn't speak of the camps, whether for re-education purposes or anything else. That seems to have changed in recent weeks. I think both on the part of the Government and Canada and like-minded and UN authorities, it would be very helpful to have data on actually how many people have been sent to detention camps, or re-education camps, or however you wish to describe them. The numbers really vary—as I mentioned in my opening remarks—from thousands to a million. In fact, we've heard far more than a million.
Data is very hard to get and is obviously, a key concern for us. We don't want to make allegations that can't be founded. It would be very helpful to have the Chinese be a little more transparent about what is happening in Xinjiang. That would help all of us and help us to work with China to try to address what, at the moment from the Canadian government perspective, we consider to be a very serious situation in which international human rights norms are being violated.