Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I thank you all for being here today and for answering our questions.
You have spoken about how this decision was made based on information that you received when you liaised with the humanitarian sector. Could you provide this committee with a list of the organizations that asked for this process instead of a humanitarian carve-out? If you could provide a list of the organizations that didn't want a humanitarian carve-out but wanted this onerous task instead, that would be great.
I also have some questions about timing. I understand that you can't answer the questions with exactness on this, but I just very quickly texted a friend I know who works in the sector. She put in a proposal for grant funding in May 2022 and has now been told that it will be many months before she receives a decision.
I don't blame anyone at Global Affairs Canada. They are underfunded. They are under-resourced and they are overworked. That has been happening for some time. The 15% cut to our ODA is not going to help that situation, but I will say that it does make me very concerned that we don't have the capacity within government to do this in a timely fashion. This is a problem.
Ms. Loten, you said in your testimony that you would be asking for no additional information from organizations, so why are we doing this? If you're not going to get any additional information, why on earth do we need to go through this process?
It's a rhetorical question, obviously, but you can hear from my tone that I don't really see why it makes much sense to take the exact information that you already gather and use it to process something.... I think, more importantly, one of the things I'm most concerned with is that humanitarian organizations, humanitarians and people working in the field of humanitarian care are already protected under international humanitarian law. We have a legal framework there, so we were already making them prove they weren't criminals with our anti-terrorism legislation. This is making them prove it again. It doesn't make any sense. This legislation doesn't make any sense.
When you add to the fact that it doesn't make sense the fact that you're not getting any more information than you already gather and that we're looking at a situation in which you're asking three ministers to be involved—a situation in which we can't get things through the door when there's one minister involved, and now there are going to be three ministers involved—how on earth would this even work? It's just not possible.
Listen. I'm going to be bringing forward some amendments. I'm not asking you questions, because I don't think I'm going to get an answer I'm going to like.
The amendments that I'm going to be bringing forward are going to be to change the wording of “terrorist group” to “listed entity”. They are going to provide clarity to humanitarian organizations. There will be an amendment requiring the public safety minister to identify and publish the geographical areas that are controlled by listed entities, an amendment that changes the 180 days to 30 days or eliminates the period entirely, and an amendment to ensure that legislation applies to Canadian citizens, permanent residents and visa holders.
Are you open to these amendments? Will you support amendments like these, which would strengthen this legislation?