I would like to thank our witnesses for their work. This is very important for us.
Mr. Grégoire, I'd like to begin by reading from an excellent document on free trade between Canada and Columbia that you wrote and that was published in June 2009. In your document you tell us that “Álvaro Uribe himself is one of the main Columbian drug traffickers on a list drawn up in 1991 by the American Defense Intelligence Agency, the DIA, when he was a senator.” Please correct me if I'm wrong but I think that he was 81st on the list of the main Columbian drug traffickers because of his support to drug traffickers and to drug networks.
You also refer to the links between the paramilitary and the Uribe regime. In fact, you talk about Uribe government representatives and their close ties with the paramilitary who kill individuals on a regular basis and increasingly so.
I'm wondering, then, given those links with the drug trade, both as part of Mr. Uribe’s career, but also today, with the representatives of the Uribe regime who are linked to paramilitaries, and the known links between the paramilitaries and the drug trade, if one of the fundamental problems is that the regime is tied so closely with the drug trade. Is it possible that rewarding the regime by allowing this trade agreement to be put into effect would be in a way encouraging those links with the drug trade that already exist with the regime?