I did get through them, but there are many more to say. I hope that—perhaps deductively—you grasped that my suggestion of, for example, a point person at the Privy Council or an inter-ministerial working group was actually a veiled critique of the frankly incoherent position of the Canadian government.
Right now, many victims—persons who are aware of the transnational oppression—have no idea to whom they should address themselves. I have that experience. I give my own testimony as someone sanctioned by the Chinese state. I'm basically given a telephone number for consular services while I'm travelling abroad, but if something interferes with my bank account or whatever, there's no one to call and I have no idea what to do.
I would suggest that I'm perhaps more able than many other people. I don't have family in a country of origin or in China and I'm not subject to most of these...but I can tell you that under the Chinese security law, this extends to all sorts of persons, including persons with whom I have contact, which I guess means you.
I don't know what to say, but there's nobody in the Canadian government to whom I can address myself or respond. My main plea here is that this is a very large problem. That's why I mentioned the four million Canadians with dual nationality who are all potentially subject to this.
I'll just quickly tell you that the other day I had a person from Tunisia show up at my door. He was agitated. He's a businessman. He said that he needed help. I asked what I could do, because I'm not really there to help—I'm a scholar. He said that he'd gone to the embassy to renew his passport. They took it and then, in short, said they wouldn't renew it unless he changed his statements on X, and if he didn't do that, they knew who his family was in his country of origin.
This is Tunisia, a little country. We're not talking about China and we're not talking about Russia. This is a person who is visiting our country and trying to do business with our country.
I want to underline that I didn't know who to call. I think this is a problem for our country.