Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to all the witnesses for testifying and sharing your anecdotes with us. Certainly for the most part they are pretty horrific and certainly unpleasant, to say the least.
I'll share my point of view with you. This is an attempt to amend the Human Rights Act and also the Criminal Code. In my view, in the cases I've reviewed—there are ten of them, one of them from the court of appeal—they all indicate that basically the protection is already afforded to transgender people under both the human rights code and the Criminal Code.
I know Mr. Dyck said that he did some research and found no cases where section 718 of the code was invoked.
Of course, you conceded that it is difficult to prove a negative.
Having in mind that the protection, I believe, is already afforded under these two pieces of legislation, in my mind there is nothing, in changing and enacting this, that will stop transgender people from actually being abused. Wouldn't it be preferable to put efforts toward I guess educating the public? Or is there too much stigma attached to the situation of transgender to perhaps prevent such a type of promotional...or enlightening the public to the needs of your group?
I'd open that to the panel.