Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Welcome, Minister, Commissioner, and Director.
Minister, I was wondering if I could go straight to what I see as the heart of the matter, but first of all, I should say that I'm really pleased that the government continues to emphasize the first step in the resilience report from 2011, which is prevention. It's not just about people coming back and then the criminal law taking over. Prevention would also kick in even when they're returning, as I would hope we would all agree.
My question is on where the rubber hits the road, which is with communities and particularly families. We all read in the newspapers often enough or see in the news that a parent says, “I didn't know”, but just as often they say they knew, that they had started to see some signs. They say, “He was hanging out with the wrong people, becoming dogmatic in his views, he disappeared, then he did this, and I didn't know what to do.”
In a recent article about the Edmonton Somali community, Mahamad Accord, the head of the Canadian Somali Congress of Western Canada, simply has this advice: “If you suspect your children are going to be recruited...go to the authorities. Save your child while you can.”
My question, Minister—and with any assistance from your colleagues—is simply this: what exactly is triggered if a parent now goes to the authorities with these kinds of worries and suspicions? Do we have a proper system in place to know what to do? What do we do?