Thank you for the question. It's an important one.
We saw the previous Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Honourable Stéphane Dion, send out tweets mentioning the Rohingya and his concerns.
I have a few suggestions for our government that I feel might be useful. For example, ASEAN point out:
Both ASEAN and Canada have been committed to addressing common traditional and non-traditional challenges, upholding international law, and maintaining peace and security in the region.
This would be a good time to urge their partners to speak up about the plight of the Rohingya.
One problem is that during the Security Council session, many of the countries in the area refused to support country-specific mandates. While other countries such as Ireland, Spain, and France, to name a few, were very vocal about what they want to see happen specifically with Myanmar and voiced their concern, countries in the area that might have more influence have been very reluctant to speak out.
Specifically China, and Russia backing it, were two countries that opposed an independent inquiry. From everything I've seen, Canada has good ties with China and great ties with ASEAN. They need to use these. That is one point.
The second one is that they need to be more vocal on the world stage. We've seen comments from many different countries. I'm looking at news and searching specifically for what Canada is saying about this specific issue. We have seen nothing publicly. Incidents from around the world that are much smaller.... Obviously any violence is sad and horrific, and we condemn all of it, but this is something very drastic on the world stage, and Canada has been extremely silent about it, except for the tweet by the former minister.
There has been nothing from the Ambassador to Burma, Karen MacArthur. Although the previous ambassador visited a number of times, I haven't seen anything from her. I have tried emailing her a few times, with no responses from the embassy there. We just need them to be more vocal on the world stage also.