Mr. Chair, there could be two schools of thought on that. There are definitely those who want to see us bring forward sanctions, want to see us be tougher in our dealings, to walk away from any co-operation that we have with Ukraine.
We have the youth mobility agreement. We have had discussions already, which we have suspended, on Canada-Ukrainian free trade. We have military co-operation in training officers and doing officer exchanges between Ukraine and Canada.
Some people would say that we should be stopping that. Definitely we should be looking at the oligarchs and other powerful people within Ukraine who have money stashed around the world, to try to apply some freezes on that.
I am not opposed to some of those ideas. I think from the government's standpoint, especially what I am hearing from the Ukrainian-Canadian Congress and from my constituents who are interested in this, whether they have Ukrainian heritage or not, people want to see us more engaged. They want to see us pulling the people of the Ukraine and the governments they have into more of a western model. If we abandon them now or push them away, and it is seen as pushing them away, it may embolden some of their neighbours.
Right now, one of the reasons we are where we are today is because of some of the bullying tactics that have been implemented by some of their neighbours to the north. Because of that interference and the fearmongering that has taken place to essentially push President Yanukovych into walking away from the table with the European Union, we need to be out there with the Europeans, the Americans, and with other allies who want to see a stronger, more westernized and more democratic Ukraine.
We will have to be fairly sensitive on how we move forward. We do not want to allow any dollars to flow into the wrong hands. However, we definitely believe that economic prosperity is tied to increased trade with the European Union and the rest of the world. We do not want to be caught up in old imperialistic relationships that have not benefited the people of the Ukraine for the last century.