Canada-China Relations Committee on May 6th, 2024

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken Hardie]

I call the meeting to order.

Welcome to meeting number 41 of the House of Commons Special Committee on the Canada–People’s Republic of China Relationship.

Pursuant to the order of reference of May 16, 2022, the committee is meeting on its study of the Canada–People's Republic of China relations.

As indicated in the communiqué from the Speaker to all members on Monday, April 29, we have a number of measures in place to help prevent audio feedback incidents.

I think that by now, you're all accustomed to the new headsets that you'll find in the committee rooms. They'll normally be found unplugged, so you can plug them in. Make sure to set them down on the decal that's on the desk in front of you. The idea is to keep them away from the microphone so that we don't get feedback, which has been injurious to some of our translators. Lord knows we need them. We don't have enough of them in some cases, so we need to keep every one we have.

There are cards on the table. They will give you all the guidelines, but I'm sure, as I said, that you're all housebroken when it comes to the issue of preventing feedback for our translators.

Today's meeting is taking place in a hybrid format.

A number of members are on the screen. You know how to use the Zoom application to mute yourself when you're not speaking and how to access the translation.

For people who are here as witnesses, you should wait until you're recognized by name before speaking. For those participating by video conference, click on the microphone icon to activate your mic. Please mute it when you're not speaking.

For interpretation, you have the choice, at the bottom of your screen, of floor, English or French.

As a reminder, all comments should be addressed through the chair.

For members in the room, we have a speaking order tonight, so that will prescribe who gets to speak and when, at least for the first half of the meeting. We will be going in camera for the second half to conduct some committee business.

We're meeting today on the matter of Canada's Indo-Pacific strategy.

I'd like to welcome our witnesses for today's meeting.

From Alternatives, we have Feroz Mehdi, program officer, by video conference. From Human Rights Watch, we have Maya Wang, acting China director, also by video conference. From the Tibet Action Institute, we have Lhadon Tethong, director.

You'll note that Madam Wang is appearing with her camera off. That is at her request. I'm sure we can all understand some of the reasons for that.

We now have an opportunity for each of our witnesses to present up to five minutes of opening comments. We'll begin with Mr. Mehdi.

Mr. Mehdi, you have five minutes.

[Feroz Mehdi, Program Officer, Alternatives]

Thank you very much. Good evening.

I would first like to mention that the written submission I have made has many references that have been hyperlinked.

I am not an expert on Canada-People's Republic of China relations, but I'm here to speak of another country which is integral to Canada's Indo-Pacific strategy, namely India.

We are deeply concerned that in the pursuit of containing China, Canada might turn a blind eye to a deeply distressing human rights situation in India as well as the erosion of its pillars of democracy, including the legislature, the judiciary and the free press. Canada must stand against the erosion of rights and democracy in India irrespective of its China policy, because a compromised India at war with itself cannot make a reliable partner in the Indo-Pacific.

The most severe threat that I see on the horizon is the possibility of mass violence. India is home to over 200 million Muslims. Continued escalation of hate speech and home demolitions as well as calls for ethnic cleansing and genocide raise the spectre of horrific mass violence in the subcontinent. Genocide Watch and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum have both declared India at risk of mass violence.

Prime Minister Modi very recently made openly Islamophobic remarks, calling all Indian Muslims “infiltrators” during his national election campaigning just last month. By a very large majority, the European Parliament adopted a resolution last year on July 13 warning against the existence of “Hindu majoritarianism” in India. The resolution calls on the Indian government to put a rapid end to the ongoing ethnic and religious violence. The European Parliament thus joins the worldwide movement denouncing growing authoritarianism and human rights violations in India.

Even more recently, last month on April 23, the U.S. Department of State, in its human rights report, flagged a dozen different kinds of human rights abuses in India, including extrajudicial killings and forced disappearances, arbitrary arrests or detentions, torture to coerce confessions, repeated imposition of Internet shutdowns and blocked telecommunications, surveillance of civil society activists, trolling of human rights defenders and punishment of family members for alleged offences by a relative.

According to Human Rights Watch's India country report 2022, the BJP—that is the ruling party in the government, the majority government—“continued its systematic discrimination and stigmatization of religious and other minorities, particularly Muslims. BJP supporters increasingly committed violent attacks against targeted groups. The government's Hindu majority ideology was reflected in bias in institutions, including the judiciary and constitutional authorities such as the National Human Rights Commission.”

The authorities have intensified their efforts to silence civil society activists and independent journalists using politically motivated criminal charges, including terrorism, to imprison those who denounce or criticize government abuses.

The BJP government's implementation of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act in 2019 is a blatant example of discriminatory legislation providing a pathway to Indian citizenship for non-Muslim migrants from neighbouring countries while excluding Muslims.

According to the Reporters Without Borders Asia-Pacific report, violence against journalists, politically partisan media and concentration of media ownership demonstrate that press freedom is in crisis in 'the world's largest democracy, governed since 2014 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.”

We call upon the Government of Canada to use every international forum at its disposal to hold India accountable.

For instance, India is currently undergoing its Financial Action Task Force mutual evaluation review. Canada has an opportunity to hold India to account for the misuse of FAFT recommendations and the misuse of anti-terror laws to target civil society and political opposition.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken Hardie]

Mr. Mehdi, I'm wondering if we could ask you to wrap up your comments now, because you've gone over your five minutes.

[Feroz Mehdi]

Sure. Can I just take 30 more seconds to wrap up?

Mr. Chair, we also believe that people-to-people dialogue through civil society organizations between Canada and India is important to share ideas and views on the human rights situation in our countries, and our government should think of investing in this process.

I'll stop there. Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken Hardie]

Thank you very much.

We'll now go to Ms. Wang.

You have five minutes. Go ahead.

[Maya Wang, Acting China Director, Human Rights Watch]

Thank you very much.

It is my pleasure to speak with you this evening. I hope you're all well.

I am Maya Wang. I'm the acting China director at Human Rights Watch. I have worked for 17 years in tracking human rights abuses in China, Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong.

First of all, I would like to agree with Mr. Mehdi. In the efforts to address China, I think it's very important to not lose sight of the growing abuses in places like India, which Human Rights Watch also documents.

Going back to China, more than a decade into President Xi Jinping's rule, the Chinese government has very significantly deepened repression across the country.

In Xinjiang, the authorities have committed, as you know, crimes against humanity, which include mass detention, forced labour, cultural persecution and widespread surveillance throughout the region.

Hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims remain arbitrarily imprisoned as a result of the Strike Hard campaign, many of them imprisoned for everyday lawful behaviour. They're imprisoned for things like engaging in basic religious activities, such as praying or having recitations of the Quran on their cellphones. The average sentence for these kinds of behaviours is 12 and a half years.

As to the situation in Tibet, I'll leave it to my co-speaker, my colleague after me, Lhadon, who will elaborate.

In Hong Kong, the authorities have erased long-protected basic civil and political rights after Beijing imposed a draconian national security law on the city in 2020. The government has also taken rapid-fire steps since then to eliminate the pro-democracy movement and the free press, arresting over 10,000 people for their involvement in the 2019 protest, and has just imposed a second security law on the city, known as “article 23”, in March this year.

Throughout China, the Chinese government has tightened its already vise-like grip on society. I don't think I need to explain in just how many different ways the Chinese government is using the law and using security forces to keep control over society, but for just a simple example, expressing pessimism about the state of the economy right now can be punishable as an act endangering state security.

Given this worsening environment for the human rights situation in China, here is what we think the Canadian government should do.

First of all, words do matter, and we shouldn't be affected by the fact that the Chinese government is deeply abusive. We should take words very seriously. We urge the Canadian government to publicly express concerns about the Chinese government's human rights violations at the highest level. It should urge the Chinese government to end crimes against humanity in Xinjiang. Let's not forget that.

Words alone are not enough. They should be backed by concrete actions. Otherwise, we all know that the Chinese government would consider words just a paper tiger. In Hong Kong, for example, the Canadian government should impose targeted sanctions on rights-abusing Chinese and Hong Kong officials after article 23 was just enacted.

While we appreciate the Canadian Parliament's decision to resettle 10,000 at-risk Uyghurs and we also appreciate Canada's ban on forced labour, we fear that the current ban and these actions are not enough. We recommend that you adopt laws, such as a prohibition against imports from Xinjiang, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act in the United States, to address Chinese government-sponsored forced labour throughout the region. We also recommend that you pass a due diligence law requiring companies to address human rights abuses in their supply chains in Xinjiang and elsewhere.

Finally, Canada should also act to address transnational repression by the Chinese government in Canada. We recommend that the Canadian government encourage universities to track instances of direct or indirect Chinese government harassment, surveillance or threats on campuses. It should assist universities to report annually the number and nature of these kinds of incidents and take other measures that can protect academic freedom on campus.

We also recommend that the Canadian government conduct a review regarding the government agencies' monitoring of, and response to, Chinese government-backed harassment and intimidation in Canada, meet regularly with communities and individuals affected and hold accountable people who harass and intimidate others in Canada for views critical of the Chinese government.

Thank you. I very much look forward to your questions and the discussion tonight.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken Hardie]

Thank you, Ms. Wang.

Now we go to Lhadon Tethong, director of the Tibet Action Institute.

You have five minutes.

[Lhadon Tethong, Director, Tibet Action Institute]

Thank you for the opportunity to speak here today and represent Tibetans. I am a Tibetan Canadian.

My father was born in a free and independent Tibet in 1934. My brother was born in a Tibetan refugee camp in south India. I was born on the traditional land of the Songhees and Esquimalt nations in Victoria on Vancouver Island.

As a Tibetan Canadian, I have to say that I welcomed the announcement of Canada’s Indo-Pacific strategy last year for numerous reasons, but most significantly because it brings into the light some critical truths about the People's Republic of China that Tibetans have known all along and that we need the world to recognize if we are to successfully navigate the clear and present threat that the PRC poses to peace and security in our world.

The first, of course, is that that the PRC is an expansionist power. This is something Tibetans learned the hard way a long time ago, with China’s invasion and occupation of our nation in 1950. It was the very first act of aggression and annexation carried out by the newly formed Communist government of the People's Republic of China.

The second truth is that the Chinese Communist Party does not in any way share the values that Tibetans, Canadians and so many others around the world hold dear, especially respect for human rights, democracy and the rule of law. Tibetans have lived without fundamental rights or freedom since 1959. Some years and decades have been worse than others, depending on who may have been in power at the moment in China. Ultimately, the CCP is the CCP and has been ruling Tibetan people with the most vicious iron fist for all these decades. Just these past five years alone, Tibet has been ranked as the least free place on earth in Freedom House's very high-profile global ranking on civil and political liberties.

Today at least one million Tibetan children between the ages of four and 18 are living in a system of colonial boarding schools in Tibet. This means that at least three out of every four school-aged children are living their lives separated from their parents and families in state-run residential schools that are specially designed to isolate them to erase their Tibetan identity and replace it with a hyper-nationalist Chinese identity.

The final truth that I want to talk about is that the reason the PRC government engages with the international community through the UN or through political or trade associations or agreements is not because because it wants to promote mutual prosperity for the betterment of all people or because it wants to be friends with and learn from our democratic leaders and our democratic models; rather, it engages in these ways because it wants to learn how best to dominate and control these spaces and, ultimately, how to remake them to serve its own interests and purposes for its own benefit.

This has been most obvious for Tibetans watching China at the UN all these years, where PRC leaders and delegations do nothing but lie through their teeth and paint a picture of life in Tibet in particular that's completely devoid of any on-the-ground reality. While all these truths about the nature of the PRC government paint a very bleak and distressing picture, I think it's critical to also recognize one other truth that, I believe, speaks to hope for the future.

Xi Jinping and the CCP are unelected and therefore have no real legitimacy to lead the Chinese people. They've held power until now by ruthlessly suppressing any and all opposition and dissent and also because they have delivered some measure of economic prosperity, but from what we can tell now and what many experts are saying, this is ending, and it’s not a matter of if; it’s just a matter of when.

Xi Jinping’s totalitarian rule, failing economic policies and paranoid political manoeuvring have created deep discord and division within the CCP. In particular, widespread suffering under China’s very harsh zero-COVID policies and the sudden lifting of the restrictions undermined Xi Jinping’s legitimacy and generated an understanding, especially among young people, as seen in the White Paper protests, that the CCP does not have the capability to lead and does not have what China needs now in terms of a future with freedom and democracy.

We believe that taking a strong public stand and a principled stand on Tibet, and on human rights more broadly, will tell people inside China and beyond what Canada truly values.

Although the CCP leaders won't take kindly to such messages, we recognize that Xi Jinping and the CCP are not the future; the future actually lies with young people, workers and the legions of human rights defenders who are suffering, dissatisfied and hungry for change.

The future also lies with Tibetans who share basic values with Canadians. Canada has a long history of—

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken Hardie]

Lhadon, excuse me, madam, but I wonder if you could wrap up. You've gone past your five minutes. Thank you.

[Lhadon Tethong]

I will.

Canada has a long history of supporting human rights in Tibet and the aspirations of Tibetan people. His Holiness the Dalai Lama is one of only seven honorary Canadian citizens. Everything Tibetans and His Holiness the Dalai Lama stand for—peace, compassion, democracy and justice—are the fundamental values that Canada has stated it supports, which are also core to peace and security in the world, as is the Indo-Pacific strategy.

Therefore, we would ask that Minister Joly, on behalf of the Government of Canada, speak out publicly against the colonial boarding school system in Tibet and echo the recommendations made by UN human rights experts, who are calling on China to abolish this system.

Also, we ask that Canada further impose sanctions against the architects of the boarding school system, since doing so would have a huge impact with respect to accountability for Tibetan parents and educators on the ground inside Tibet.

Also, we need the Government of Canada to make very strong and clear public statements and to work with like-minded partners and allies to make it clear that Tibetans will decide who the next Dalai Lama is. Tibetans have been managing this process for a half a millennium, and the government of the PRC has no role in this matter, no matter how desperate they may be for one, because this process belongs to the religious leadership of Tibet and the people to whom His Holiness the Dalai Lama entrusts it and no one else.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken Hardie]

Thank you.

Now, we'll go to our rounds of questioning.

We'll begin with Mr. Chong for six minutes.

[Michael Chong, Conservative, Wellington—Halton Hills, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Today we're talking about human rights, whether it's with respect to Uyghurs in Xinjiang, people in Hong Kong, people in Tibet, Muslims or other minorities throughout the Indo-Pacific region.

My first question for all three panellists is this: Which peer democracy of Canada's do you think has the best practices in terms of advancing human rights in the Indo-Pacific region? What country among the peer democracies that Canada is associated with do you think is doing this in a way that's most effective in the region?

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken Hardie]

Why don't you designate somebody to answer?

[Michael Chong, Conservative, Wellington—Halton Hills, ON]

I'll start with Mr. Mehdi and then Ms. Wang and Ms. Tethong.

[Feroz Mehdi]

It's a good question. I don't know which country to identify of those that are promoting democracy or democratic institutions in there today, if that is the question, Mr. Chair.

However, as I mentioned in my presentation, the European parliamentarians have passed a resolution highlighting the abuse of human rights in India. Also, there are institutions like USCIRF, which rates—

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken Hardie]

Excuse me, Mr. Mehdi. I'm wondering if you could turn your camera on, please, sir.

[Feroz Mehdi]

I'm sorry about that.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken Hardie]

It's all right.

You can leave your camera on and just mute your microphone when you're not speaking.

[Feroz Mehdi]

That's great. Thank you.

There are institutions that are testing and promoting the Indian democratic institutions, but so far nothing concrete has been done in India, as far as I know.

[Maya Wang]

I think that's a very difficult question because there are basically no perfect policies on human rights, especially because we saw in a previous era—essentially the era of engagement with China—that human rights issues got very much pushed down the hierarchy while economic engagement with China was prioritized.

Now, in this era, I think we see national security being the top priority in many governments, and again, although human rights are being talked about, a lot of the policies are not really about promoting human rights. I think a lot of it is about competition, and there are some understandable reasons for that. Nonetheless, I think using human rights as an instrument to compete rather than also promoting them as a value to speak to people inside China and give them the strength and support they need—ultimately they are the people who would change China for the better—is a short-sighted way of seeing it.

However, if you really pushed me on what kinds of policies have been declared in terms of being better when it comes to China and human rights, I would probably put forward some of the European Union's laws that have to do with due diligence, which were recently passed, or their laws having to do with forced labour. Although I think some of those are watered down, they have the ability to deal with these issues in a more comprehensive manner that includes China. However, we would like to see some legislation more like the Uyghur Forced Labour Prevention Act, which is specifically about Xinjiang.

There's no good model, but I would encourage two things: Number one is that we are in an age when political leaders have to stand up for human rights, because they are important. If we don't, I think we're going to enter a very difficult era globally. Number two is that we must hold the Chinese government accountable in an equal manner, one that is not used just for scoring political points.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken Hardie]

Ms. Tethong, do you wish to weigh in?

[Lhadon Tethong]

I don't know that I would say which one is doing it best; I don't know enough to say.

I think the key to a healthy democracy and upholding human rights and the rule of law can be seen best through strong support for civil society and for movements.

The best way to counter the rise of authoritarian governments and powers in the world is to support and invest in people's movements. That needs to happen more, considering the now total crackdown on what space there was for civil society in China until recently. There has to be more of an investment made in people's movements and student movements and in supporting space for these groups to get together to organize and to share lessons and skills. I think that is ultimately the best way to promote and protect democracy and counter authoritarianism.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken Hardie]

Thank you, Mr. Chong. Your time has expired, sir.

[Michael Chong, Conservative, Wellington—Halton Hills, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken Hardie]

I will now go to Mr. Oliphant for six minutes or less.