Status of Women committee  That's correct, yes.

Status of Women committee  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

Status of Women committee  Madam Chair, habitually in the departmental unit in the minister's office we dealt with senior officials simply because we didn't have the time to deal with every official in a department. There's a lot of traffic going through the minister's office, and we needed to make sure we

Status of Women committee  We deal with many issues there. We're always trying to coordinate departmental officials and departmental advice. There was indeed a very productive meeting, as indicated in this e-mail.

Status of Women committee  If I recall—and you have to remember I had thousands of meetings over the two years that I was in the minister's office—there were maybe six or seven individuals at that meeting.

Status of Women committee  Thank you very much for the question. I just wanted to ensure that everybody was on the same wavelength as to how to best express Canadian policy as made by the minister. I think it might be helpful, because we've been talking about this specific issue on the DRC and internati

Status of Women committee  Thank you for the question. This is certainly one of the issues that officials and the minister's office were thinking very carefully about. I would go back to the point that these were suggested changes and that this was a conversation that was going on between the minister's o

Status of Women committee  Well, I think it's exactly because they were important phrases and important issues that we had the meeting and that we had follow-up meetings with the minister's staff. The other part of not being fully aware of whether the minister's office knew all the implications was me sayi

Status of Women committee  I've been with the department now for about eight years.

Status of Women committee  I don't recall. I know that there were a few e-mails exchanged on this subject. There were also conversations in person. There were meetings.

Status of Women committee  If I remember the question, it was about how many time before May 7, 2009, I had requested meetings with officials to discuss these issues. I don't believe there were any occasions, because, as the e-mail makes fairly clear, we were dealing with these on a case-by-case basis.

Status of Women committee  Of course we discussed these issues and discussed what might be the impact of these changes in language, and we had follow-up discussions with the minister's office to explain what the difference would be, for example, between saying “impunity” and “prevention”, and these were ve

Status of Women committee  Madam Chair, my sole concern was to ensure that our language accurately and efficiently expressed the policy of the Government of Canada, which is decided by the Minister of Foreign Affairs. Ultimately, for example, in this letter, it's the minister's signature going on the lette

Status of Women committee  Certainly. As I think I pointed out at the beginning, I'm not an expert on gender equality or on a number of the issues raised there. That is essentially me editorializing. That is, in effect, me showing that I wasn't aware of all the issues. That's exactly why we had the dis

Status of Women committee  If I recall from the meeting.... As I said, we had hundreds of meetings over the two years that I was there.