The Minister of Finance actually held a press conference in the foyer of that big white building down there on O'Connor Street, which houses the Department of Finance.

State terror manifests itself in ten or so methods of repression: undermining the judicial system, politicisation of the army and police, attacks on press freedom, occupation of the estates of white farmers, slander against independent institutions like the Red Cross, purportedly acting as cover organisations for the opposition, electoral fraud, tapping the opposition’s telephone traffic, detention of and slurs on members of the opposition MDC party, violence and intimidation against supposed supporters of the opposition and, finally, murder of political opponents.

The 1994 findings of the Special Joint Committee on Canada's Defence Policy and the government's white paper on Defence have been completely ignored, while the press yesterday spoke of across-the-board cutbacks of Canada's defence capability.

This very morning I read a press note from one of the employers in the road haulage sector. It complained about the White Paper, regretting that it was too rail-orientated.

The discussion paper, or white paper, as it has sometimes been called in the press, deals with proposed or potential changes, or ideas for changes or potential changes to these acts, and the government needs to have the input of these witnesses before the end of October.

In December 2005 it awarded its annual human rights prize, the Sakharov prize for freedom of thought, jointly to Ladies in White (Damas de Blanco), for their work on behalf of political prisoners in Cuba, Hauwa Ibrahim, for her work as a lawyer defending women and children prosecuted under Sharia law in Nigeria, and Reporters without Frontiers, in recognition of their campaign for freedom of the press throughout the world.