Senator Boehm: Thank you very much for an interesting and, I would say, comprehensive speech. My concern, of course, is also with the treatment of the Uighur minority in Xinjiang province, and I have worked on this for some years and in fact, on the famous case of Hussein Jalil, I go back to 2006.

My question is, however, a very specific one. I ask because I simply don’t know the answer. You cited some U.S. legislation and measures that other countries have taken. I know there was a declaration from the European Parliament because I have read that as well. But I’m wondering whether you have any sense of the impact of that legislation in the U.S. — in other words, how it has been applied — because it would raise, I think, certain resource questions — and I don’t have answers to that either — but in terms of how, whether it is through CBSA or other entities or in fact through our missions and consulates in China that this would be applied. I’m just very curious. Thanks.

Senator Housakos: As you know, it has only been a few months now since the United States legislature passed their legislation banning all products coming in from Xinjiang. The truth of the matter is I’m not sure how that legislation on the U.S. side has been applied. I’m by no means an expert on how the Americans conduct their trade.

One thing I do believe is that this particular bill will make it a lot less time-consuming and a lot less bureaucratic for CBSA because any bill of lading coming to any Canadian port would be turned back. This is an acknowledgment, after tons and tons of international evidence from groups of everything that’s going on right now in the food industry, in the cotton industry, in that area — all of that activity is being done using forced labour of the Uighur people.

I think this would be the simplest thing. Right now, we have a complicated bill in place which places the onus of proof on CBSA to come up with evidence that the products coming in from Xinjiang are basically products that have been manufactured or put together by slave labour.

This bill simplifies the actual application of what we’re trying to do, which is to make sure that no product made by forced labour comes to our shores. No one can convince me that, over the last two or three years, with the law that we currently have on the books, only one container identified as having products manufactured in Xinjiang by slave labour has arrived here. I find that outrageous. It’s hypocritical for us, knowing all the evidence of what’s going on in that region to assume that the vast majority of products — as I said, tomatoes from the agricultural industry, cotton from the area, solar platforms, industrial equipment — that nothing else has been imported from Xinjiang. All of this stuff is well known around the world. There’s nobody that denies that these products are being built, manufactured and produced, on the backs of slave labour of the Uighur people.

I hope I answered your question. I think this bill will simplify our response for managing the risks of accepting products that are coming here, having been manufactured by slave labour.