My own experience in this regard is very limited.
I had the opportunity to go to Eritrea to visit a Canadian company, a Canadian mine site owned by a company called Nevsun in a place called Bisha. What became clear to me while I was there was that, whatever the sins of the Canadians may or may not have been in this situation, there was interest within the Eritrean government, from some participants in that government, in having Canada operating there because, in a sense, the Canadians are innocent. We just want to go in and make money. That's our entire agenda. We have certain rules that we have to operate under. If you want to float a new bond issue on a Canadian securities stock exchange, you have to meet with certain criteria regarding labour standards and environmental standards and so on. These are all audited. [Inaudible—Editor] you want to walk away with some money. That's all we want to do, whereas the Chinese state wants to do a good deal more. It wants to get involved in the running of your country.
This seems to me to be a competitive advantage. What we're trying to resolve here are issues where, in this particular case but also in many others, there's a supply chain of products or services that are provided to the Canadian company that may have involved human rights abuses. What do we do to make sure that we can deal with that so that Canadian companies can continue to operate without being overly encumbered by our regulations in order to compete with the Chinese in any country in the world?