I think it's a good point. When it comes to travel, I always look back to what we do in our normal lives. As members of Parliament, you understand totally how important it is to know the people on the main street in your hometowns. Really, you can extend that example to the main street in Yemen or the main street in Dubai. If you're not there and somebody else is, you're going to lose.
When we talk about it being a very simple exercise in human nature, international trade is a very simple art. It's how often you are there, what you are offering, and whether they need your service. But in my company, being involved in international trade, if I sat in Calgary and waited for people to come, we wouldn't do any business and I'd lose my job—and I should lose my job because I'm not doing the work that's required to be in international business development.
The committee needs to become like that. Regardless of the critics, part of your role is teaching the public. We can help in that, but we have to be able not only to defend what you're doing, but to celebrate the successes that members of Parliament and the ministers have, or that the Prime Minister has when he goes and makes these kinds of visits.
Just as a final comment on Yemen, two years ago, I think, we invited the three ambassadors or three representatives—you, David, David Viveash, who was then the ambassador to Libya, and Graham Rush—to come to Yemen. With them, two MPs came along, one Liberal and one Conservative. We went to meet the President of Yemen. The reason we got to see the President of Yemen was that we had two members of Parliament with us. When we went to the room, the Liberals were in government and the representative sat by the President. Our friend from the Conservative caucus from Calgary was sitting at the back of the room, and President Salih asked where the other member of Parliament was. We said he was in opposition, and the President said, “No, he's an elected member. He comes and sits on the other side of me.” That just spoke volumes.
This wasn't a high-level minister or the Prime Minister. These were two backbench members of Parliament. So I think you shouldn't underestimate the impact that each one of you has both in educating the public and your colleagues, but also in doing many of these missions and helping business get business.