I want to thank all of you who have come today. I appreciate very much your coming.
I want to take just a moment to congratulate the Council of Canadians with Disabilities on your successful challenge of VIA Rail. I think that was a very important thing you did on behalf of Canadians with disabilities across the country, and I congratulate you on that.
I think all of us in this room are on board in terms of the need for international conventions that address issues like this. However, I guess my problem with international conventions is that we can pass all of these fine things, and have wonderful feelings of doing good, but when it comes to the whole question of having adequate monitoring of a country's ability to actually live up to the convention, and then, beyond the monitoring, to have some kind of mechanism of enforcement, we really run into serious problems, don't we, on the international scene?
Even in affluent countries like ours, where I think we have the resources to put into making sure that international conventions are observed at sort of the ground level for people with disabilities.... You run into situations in Third World countries where they might want to do this--and maybe they don't, but if they do want to--and yet they don't have the money to do it. They don't have the facilities. They don't have the kind of resources that we in our affluent nation have to help our people with disabilities.
So just as a very broad question to anybody who wants to take a stab at it, how do you get beyond the formation of a convention, the bringing together of countries that will actually sign it, and move into adequate monitoring and enforcement to see that it actually takes place?
Anybody.