Foreign Affairs committee  I am not going to talk about particular cases, but I will say that, generally, where we believe that Canadians are at risk and that interventions at a particular level or by particular interlocutors are going to assist in the well-being of that client, there would be no hesitatio

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes. That is the case.

Foreign Affairs committee  I think the MOU we put in place led to significant improvement in our ability to access clients, but our ability to access Canadians there is not universal.

Foreign Affairs committee  We fully appreciate how difficult these situations are for Canadians caught up in them and sometimes even more difficult for their loved ones back home who don't have any information on how they're doing and who feel powerless to help them. These situations create a high level of

Foreign Affairs committee  We'd be happy to.

Foreign Affairs committee  I can assure you that from a departmental perspective, we view our duty to assist Canadians as one of the pre-eminent things that we do as a department. It's the part of our department that is the most public. It's the one where we directly provide services to Canadians. When we

Foreign Affairs committee  The United States is where we have the largest volume of cases because that's where the largest number of Canadians travel. They're not necessarily the most complex cases because there's a well-established rule of law and legal structure in the United States and commonalities. I

Foreign Affairs committee  I'll turn to my colleague on the case management side to answer that, but I would just say that, as a general principle, the places that are more complex are places where the legal and political systems differ significantly from ours and also where perhaps there are security issu

Foreign Affairs committee  We look at each case, as we mentioned, in this specific context. The bottom-line question that we ask ourselves is what will be most helpful to this client. We look at the type of risk or sentence that they've been subject to, the grounds, the due process that's been applied, whe

Foreign Affairs committee  As I mentioned, we have an elaborate emergency preparedness system. Within Global Affairs Canada, we have a 24-7 emergency watch and response centre that operates 365 days a year on a continual basis. It monitors for natural disasters that we can see coming, such as hurricanes th

Foreign Affairs committee  The registration of Canadians abroad system is publicized through our website, all of our social media, and other opportunities to try to get Canadians to let us know where they're travelling, where they're going to be staying, and what their contact information is. I would say t

Foreign Affairs committee  I just want to clarify the question. Our policy is to request access and to seek it through all the means that we have. In all cases where Canadians are detained, we have consular service standards in that regard, and they vary by the region and the level of risk to Canadians in

Foreign Affairs committee  Here I would distinguish between two types of cases. There are what we call “complex consular cases”, which are cases of detention where the local context, political circumstances, or conditions of detention are problematic. We can give you that now. Within the consular of servic

Foreign Affairs committee  I was just going to say that in some of the places where we actually urge people to avoid all travel, we actually have a presence. For example, in Kabul or Baghdad or places in war zones, we have missions and staff that are there under specific security protections, but we don't

Foreign Affairs committee  As you mentioned, the importance of our relationships with other countries in terms of providing reciprocal consular services is really important, because it allows us to extend our reach. There are regions, for example, in the Americas, where the Government of Canada has a much