Thank you very much for the question, Madam Chair.
I should preface my answer by saying that, first of all, I'm not an expert in any of these subjects here. I'm not an expert on gender equality, on international humanitarian law, or on children in armed conflict. My role in the minister's office was to facilitate dialogue between staff of the minister's office and officials within the department to ensure that the best advice was getting to the minister's office.
In this case...and I think some of the nuance has been lost, in some way, over the last few hearings on this issue. In my e-mail, what I was referring to was suggestions of changes that the minister's office was inquiring about. These weren't directions for changes. This was the start of a conversation. There are very often conversations taking place between the minister's office and officials who are experts on the issues to decide on the most appropriate language to use to accurately and efficiently express Canadian policy.
In this case, a number of requested language changes were coming up on several occasions. Various divisions and bureaux were seeing these kinds of requests and were asking for a bit more information behind this. We decided that in our office, which is the departmental unit, the most efficient way to proceed would be to have a larger meeting with a number of different bureaux so that we could talk through the common requests and we could make sure that we were able to give the minister's office the best advice on the best language that could be used for Canadian policy.