Thank you very much, Chair, and thank you for the welcome to the committee.
Thugs rje che—that's thank you in Tibetan—to all the witnesses, virtual and in person, who have come to share such important information. It's not lost on me as a Muslim Canadian that today is Eid al-Fitr, and Muslim Canadians are free to celebrate with their families, as I have been doing with my family today, while religious worship and religious freedom in other parts of the world, including in Tibet, are extremely restricted. I think it underscores the need for us all to be vigilant. Let me start by saying that.
I want to put out a request to the first three witnesses. I was jotting things down as quickly as possible, but I think between Thupten Rabgyal-la and Sherap Therchin and Tenzin Dorjee, you have provided about 12 different recommendations. Could you please just make sure that all of those recommendations are provided in writing to the clerk and the analysts? That would be very beneficial for us, because we do want to scrutinize those very closely.
My first question in these seven minutes is for the Tibet Action Institute and Tenzin Dorjee-la.
It seems to me that Tibet, given what we've heard, is at an inflection point where Canada was in maybe the 1870s or 1880s, just when we were designing the residential school system for indigenous kids in this country. The overt policy of the Government of Canada at the time was to take the Indian out of the child.
You've said quite candidly, Tenzin-la, that the PRC under Xi Jinping is deliberately attempting to assimilate Tibetans quite directly by converting to a complete usage of Mandarin. What analogies do you see between what happened in this country, and unfortunately continues to this day in Canada—with the Indian residential school system, where we took kids away from their indigenous homes and put them in faraway places, forcing them to learn English as a foreign language—and what is happening right now in Tibet? What lessons can we apply from our own experience to help the Tibetan cause?
Could you start with that, please, Mr. Dorjee?