Thank you.
We know from studies that have been done that today only 3% of the world's population lives in countries with open conditions for civil society action and that generally global peacefulness has been declining for 11 of the past 14 years. That is a trend line that comes from the annual terrorism study and so forth.
I want to echo my colleague from Human Rights Watch about the double standards that we see. We don't criticize what's happening in Saudi Arabia or what is happening by Israeli activism in Palestine, but we do criticize countries that are not necessarily allies of the West, or we ignore countries like India and what is happening there right now in terms of the Muslim population. There are severe early warning signs.
The question is, what is the leverage that countries like Canada have? What we've seen in the case of Iran, Syria and elsewhere is that the blanket sanctions that affect a large swath of the population embolden the hardliners and have a tremendously detrimental impact on civil society and ordinary civilians. We need to make sure that we're not doing harm, that we're not adding harm.
Targeted sanctions, like the ones you've just introduced in the case of Iran, are much better in terms of ensuring that the public hears what you're against and what you're for.
We've done a lot of harm to the Syrian population and to the Iranian population with past blanket sanctions, and it's very hard to undo that kind of harm.
I'm happy to answer more.