Thank you.
Mr. Peschard, if we hope to end up with a unanimous report, at some point we will have to agree on certain basic facts.
This is one of the basic facts in the evidence that we have studied: people only realized several years later that their rights had been violated by Canadian authorities, and generally speaking without the government's knowledge. We in the Bloc Québécois can readily state that we have never had any ambition to be in power in Ottawa and that we have never been in power in the past.
The fundamental idea we wish to address here is the following: following the study of these events by commissions of inquiry, the latter have made recommendations to ensure that these events would never take place again, and more generally that they would never take place again without the minister and the government being aware of them.
I believe that some people will turn to you, to your human rights and freedoms organization, to find out how they can have reinstated certain rights that they feel were violated.
I will give you an example: someone comes to you and says that they have been wrongly perceived to be a terrorist. This man has just learned that he can no longer travel to Canada by plane, that it would be dangerous for him to go to the United States or even to another country. The RCMP tells him that they believe he is a terrorist, that he has ties to terrorists and that they would like to hire him as a double-agent. He answers that he is not a terrorist, that he doesn't know any terrorists, and that he doesn't wish to become a double-agent. He says that he has a wife and children, and that even if he did know any terrorists, this would be dangerous work that he wants no part of. He explains that that when he went to Pakistan, he only visited family and that, even if he had met any terrorists, he wouldn't have known it. He would now very much like to benefit from the same rights as all Canadians.
What organization could he turn to to rectify this situation? Moreover, if the recommendations of Justices O'Connor and Iacobucci were implemented, would there be any organizations he could turn to to expose the fact that he was unfairly treated because he was falsely labelled a terrorist, when in fact he is not a terrorist and has no desire at all to be one?
