Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my hon. colleague for his ongoing commitment to issues of human rights and for his advocacy on issues of Canadians abroad. I respect his passion and commitment to raising these issues. I will always work with him and my colleagues in the House of Commons to ensure that obviously we do our best to help Canadians abroad and if they are in trouble, to bring them back home. We will constantly speak up for Canadian values. We are not just talking about Canadian values. We are talking about universal human rights. We should always be consistent in our defence of universal human rights and always speak up for those rights.
Where I differ with my hon. colleague sometimes is not that we do not speak up on human rights issues, but he may want us to use a different tone or a different approach, and I respect that. A healthy discussion and a healthy debate needs to be done here in the House of Commons and in the public domain. I will always welcome that conversation and I am happy to engage him on it all the time. I welcome his input.
Let me first talk about the case of Pastor Lim. Obviously our government is gravely concerned about the well-being of Pastor Lim and his health and his rights. I have met with Pastor Lim's son and I want to take a moment to congratulate Jim on the fact that he now is a new father. It really saddens the family and all of us frankly that the grandfather is not with his son celebrating the arrival of his first grandson. The fact that the family has welcomed a new child but the grandfather is not here with them is a difficult, bittersweet moment. It only adds to the level of urgency with which we want to see Pastor Lim return home. I have also met with members of the Korean community who passionately care about the well-being of Pastor Lim and I will continue to do so.
I want to assure them and my hon. colleague that our government is approaching this with the highest degree of urgency. He is right. I wish I could publicly share with my colleague all the work that we have been doing and will continue to do. I just cannot do that for the benefit of Pastor Lim. In order to respect all of the efforts and ensure that hopefully we have some success, I need to respect the privacy and the diplomatic confidentiality of the many efforts we are putting into this case.
I want to also assure the House and my hon. colleague, and everybody who cares about this case, that we are constantly re-evaluating our approach. We are constantly assessing and reassessing what we are doing to identify creative and innovative ways to deal with this case. This is an important matter. I want to assure the member and others that we are actively engaged on this case.
To the member's other question about the case of Mr. Celil, we are obviously concerned about his well-being. Mr. Celil's deportation to China from Uzbekistan happened when I was serving as a member of Parliament in my first term in 2006. It has been almost 10 years and I cannot believe Mr. Celil is still in prison and we have not been able to get even access to him because the Chinese government is denying the fact that he has Canadian citizenship. We will continue to push for at least first consular access and then his release.