I want to commend all three groups and all four of you for your great work. Some of you are refugees, have been imprisoned and have survived some of this stuff, and the others have helped out a tremendous amount for hundreds of refugees.
Mr. El Shafie, you have spoken passionately in public about the plight of the Yazidis. In my hand I have a copy of your testimony before the subcommittee in 2014. You testified that you had led delegations to Iraq with parliamentarians such as Conservative MPs Brad Butt, Russ Hiebert, and Leon Benoit.
You testified that with these MPs you visited a Yazidi refugee camp. In your own testimony you said that what was happening to the Yazidis was a genocide, yet none of your recommendations or your statements called for the Canadian government to resettle any Yazidi refugees. In fact, what you recommended at the time was that we co-operate with the Iraqi government and that we push other neighbouring states to stop funding terrorism, but none of them ever called—despite seeing a genocide—for the Yazidis to be brought here.
At that time, none of the three government members of Parliament called it a genocide, nor did they ask for refugees to be brought to Canada or took any action in that regard. In fact, now we've learned that only a carful, maybe four people, from the Yazidi community ended up being refugees during that time.
You also called for more military intervention, but not resettlement. You criticize this government for not bringing in enough Yazidis, yet there was no criticism of the past government whatsoever.
My question to you is, can you tell us if you ever recommended bringing Yazidi refugees to Canada prior to this government's coming into power?