If you could sent that to our Clerk, it would be much appreciated.
I have three questions. First off, the Colombian government has an extremely slick public relations machine. We saw that at work when we were down in Bogota. Not only the government, but also representatives of the so-called independent sector that turned out later to be their former cabinet ministers or ambassadors. So there were a lot of people taking essentially the same line as the government, but upon further investigation it turns out that a lot of those people are connected with the government.
When you find out in a court case, as lawyers, that somebody has a conflict of interest, that they're testifying but they don't reveal fully their links with the government, what generally happens? And what advice can you give this committee in terms of that testimony?
Secondly, in terms of the independent, the really independent testimony we heard, it was overwhelmingly concerned about the ongoing human rights violations and labour rights violations. There is as well a lot of concern about economic violence that is occurring, the fact that there are very clearly, as you've testified, links between the government and the paramilitaries. The paramilitaries are very present. Thousands of them are still on the ground. And we heard some testimony from people who were working on the ground for the UNHCR that there is increasingly economic violence. In other words, paramilitaries working with companies, none of whom have been investigated, like Nestlé, Coca-Cola, and Chiquita.
My second question is, do you feel the government is almost rewarding criminal activity by moving ahead with a free trade agreement when there is all of this uncertainty around links between the paramilitary and the government?
My third question is this. As you may have seen from previous testimony, what the Canadian government proposes is that there be some sort of fine. When there are ongoing human rights violations, labour rights violations, you pay a fine into a solidarity fund, kind of treating it like a speeding ticket if you kill a labour activist or a human rights activist. Do you feel that is sufficient to deal with the human rights issues in Colombia, or do you feel, like I do, that it's some kind of horrific joke?