Yes, I will provide a copy of the letter. I don't know what the procedure is in this committee—in the other committee I wasn't allowed to provide paper—but I will.
The letter came off the website of the China Cultural Industry Association. If you go to the website, you will find a lot of information. There are a whole bunch of congratulatory letters from people all over the world, but including a number of people in Canada—from the Government of Quebec, for example, and others. I don't have a full list of them here. They were well known and I don't deny that they had links with the government in China. However, I think everybody understood that we were dealing with a Chinese Communist government.
From what I understand, whether it was Chinese state-owned corporations like CNOOC, which purchased Nexen Energy for $15 billion—that's not an independent private corporation, that is a corporation controlled by the Communist Party in China—everybody had their eyes open to doing business with China. However, we all felt back then that it was worth the trouble, given that China was the rising superpower in the world.
I think slowly—and it was slowly—we started to realize that this relationship was very difficult. You started to see, in the mid-2010s, intellectual property theft, dual-use research that was being done, and questions about whether universities were being diligent enough in looking at these things. At the same time, we were still doing cultural things with China, even as late as 2017.
I found an article in University Affairs by the rector at the University of Ottawa, saying everybody should be doing research with China. In 2015, you had UBC announcing a major research project with China.
The penny really dropped for us with the hostage-taking of the two Michaels, and then we realized, boy, we're in a different world. With the wolf warrior diplomacy, the way these people are treating the Uyghurs, the way they're dealing with Hong Kong, this is not what we thought we were dealing with. I think it changed our perception.