Subcommittee on International Human Rights Committee on April 13th, 2026

[Fred Davies, Conservative, Niagara South, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to thank all of the presenters today for the incredible information you've given us as parliamentarians. It is enlightening but also troubling, because what I see happening in the world today is the disintegration of support for human rights organizations. We see funding diminishing across the board.

I want to juxtapose that sort of shifting narrative against what we're hearing. We're hearing about a new world order. We're hearing that trade is now transactional, not based on policies that we have espoused as a nation for many years. What troubles me most is that we now have to accept the world as it is, not what we would like it to be. I think an individual said that out loud recently.

In trying to defend democracy, Ms. Le Roy, what is your opinion on how to mesh those two ideas together? How can we defend human rights when we are engaging in transactional contracts with countries such as China, where over years there have been massive civil rights violations and human rights violations? Particularly now, when we're looking at entering into trade agreements with a country that has demonstrated such outrageous human rights violations, how do we square that circle?

[Monika Le Roy]

I'm not sure I'm the best person to pronounce on whether Canada should or should not be increasing trade with China.

What I would feel comfortable talking about are countries where we want to create increased trade opportunities. I think Canada has woken up to realize that we weren't diversifying early enough and we haven't built enough partnerships and relationships around the world, so we're trying to find the fastest solution possible to a very seismic shift that has happened.

What we can do is find countries where we can help strengthen their democratic practices and processes, because we do want them to have audit-appropriate regulations. We do want them to have democratic parliamentary oversight of government finance and spending on infrastructure and contracts. When we have the ability to influence and support the development of those systems and those financial mechanisms with our partners, we have the opportunity to influence that process.

[Fred Davies, Conservative, Niagara South, ON]

Let's drill down into Taiwan, for example. If China does engage in some activities in Taiwan, in your experience in that region of the world, what are the implications of that globally in the promotion of democracy, when we are seeing aggression increasing across the globe?

I use Taiwan as a potential example, but it is happening elsewhere.

[Monika Le Roy]

In Vanuatu, China is funding primaries for candidates running for elected office. In other countries in the Pacific, they're funding political parties directly. These are the realities of the tactics they're using to interfere in political systems in order to make sure the outcomes are preferential to them. Our opportunity is to work and create partnerships with groups and democratic structures in that country so that there's an incentive to resist that influence.

During the COVID lockdowns in Latin America, there was a lot of concern about China trading COVID vaccines for influence in Latin America. I'm going to quote the former secretary general of the Organization of American States, who testified before the U.S. Senate foreign relations committee. His answer was that you cannot fault a country for reaching for the only lifeboat that's being offered to them.

If we want to build greater opportunities and greater space for people with democratic values, we have to help create that opportunity for them instead of expressing frustration with the fact that they haven't chosen a democratic path.

[Fred Davies, Conservative, Niagara South, ON]

Would you suggest that has been happening for longer than we realized? You say we've lost the opportunity to talk about democracy in these countries and regions. It seems to me that we dropped the ball a long time ago.

[The Chair, Liberal, Fayçal El-Khoury]

I'm sorry, but we have to leave that answer for the next round, because the time is up.

I invite Mr. Brunelle‑Duceppe to speak for five minutes.

[Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, Bloc, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'd like to get more out of Ms. Le Roy's answer.

If I'm not mistaken, Ms. Le Roy, recent history shows that a former Canadian prime minister succeeded in bringing down an entire regime. I'm referring to Mr. Mulroney, who played a leading role in bringing down the apartheid regime in South Africa. If I recall correctly, it was done precisely by cutting off trade with the apartheid regime. At the time, he managed to convince Mrs. Thatcher and Mr. Reagan to do the same, and that's how the regime was brought down.

Minister Anand appeared before the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development recently. On each occasion, she told us that it was by establishing diplomatic and trade relations that we would succeed in establishing democracy in these countries.

Ms. Le Roy, do you really believe that the Chinese Communist Party will suddenly develop a passion for democracy just because we've reached an agreement on electric vehicles and canola?

[Monika Le Roy]

Can we and should we be doing democratic support programming in China? I think there's a choice that Canada can make to do that. There are civic actors who want to improve opportunities for dialogue. There are opportunities to support groups advocating for religious freedoms.

You're talking about a very closed space, and the type of engagement that would happen is on a very different scale than in the examples you gave us. Reagan going to China was two very different-sized countries at very different moments in history. Canadian engagement in South Africa, again, was two very different proportional abilities to influence. Canada's ability to influence that Commonwealth conversation was also a little bit different.

I would personally encourage Canada to take actions and support efforts to increase civic space and democratic dialogue in China. That would be my personal choice. I'm a civil society actor.

[Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, Bloc, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you.

I would like to return to you, Ms. Cohen and Ms. Bardall, regarding the question I asked earlier. Funding for international aid and international development is melting away like snow in the sun.

In fact, these funds are often used for programs that address issues ranging from the defence of democracy to the defence of democracy advocates. Some legal programs even help people who are forced to fight in court against tyrannical regimes.

Don't you see a fairly obvious danger when you see funding being steadily eroded by various western governments right now?

[Gabrielle Bardall]

Thank you very much for the question.

A little over ten years ago, my colleague and friend Ernest Manirumva, who was an anti-corruption activist in Burundi, was dragged from his home and fatally stabbed in the head. At the time, Canada, the United States, and many other actors spoke out immediately to condemn this act. They took significant action to ensure that this type of political violence would be prevented in the future.

Last year, following the U.S. freeze on international democracy assistance, another colleague—whom I won't name here—was also arrested and taken from his home, and there was silence, or nearly so.

That's the difference funding makes.

I believe that first and foremost, both in Canada and around the world today, there is a pressing need for leadership grounded in ethics and morality. We want to hear people championing the values of democracy and human rights. This can be achieved through tools that don't cost much, such as a normative framework. We've heard various ideas here today on how to achieve this. We could have a spokesperson. We could adopt a well-defined Canadian approach rooted in a framework that enables us to denounce such acts.

We have also heard various suggestions here that do not really require increasing an existing budget, but rather propose reallocating existing funds and directing them toward different mechanisms, whether that be a special representative or something else.

We should also work with the tools currently available, whether it be the Parliamentary Centre, ParlAmericas, or our other agencies and organizations working to promote democracy through our expertise. Indeed, we have long shared our expertise with the United States and the UN, for example. The expertise is there. We need to make the most of these funds.

Finally, support for democracy goes hand in hand with our security interests. If we were to increase the defence and security budgets today, I think we could try to examine this link in a bit more depth and see how these two things can work together and, ultimately, be funded accordingly.

[Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, Bloc, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

Do I have any time left, Mr. Chair?

[The Chair, Liberal, Fayçal El-Khoury]

No.

Thank you, Ms. Bardall.

Thank you, Mr. Brunelle‑Duceppe.

I invite Mr. Zuberi to take the floor for five minutes.

[Sameer Zuberi, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'm giving my time to my colleague Ms. Vandenbeld.

[The Chair, Liberal, Fayçal El-Khoury]

The floor is yours, Anita.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

Thank you very much, and I want to thank my colleague for giving me time on this really important study.

I'd like to pick up on some of my colleagues' questions, which sounded almost like we're putting an opposition or a contradiction between supporting democracy and supporting Canada's economic and security interests. I don't believe this is actually the case.

I want to go back to Mr. Deveaux. You said something in your opening remarks about the Davos speech. If we are to find those economic partners, those security partners, those middle powers, I almost see it as a prerequisite that we are also doing this kind of work to ensure that those middle powers are not falling into the sphere of authoritarianism, so that we have the partners for the long term and we can then talk about our own economic and security interests.

Could you elaborate a little on what you meant about the Davos speech in your opening remarks?

[Kevin Deveaux]

In Davos, as I said, there were words on a page that were read, but there have to be concrete ways to do this. It's now almost three months since that speech, and I'm hoping that, through this committee and through the government, we can begin to look at what that looks like concretely.

Some of my colleagues suggested a strategy or special representatives, which I think are great ideas. I've mentioned rapid deployment. I guess all our points, to some extent, relate to the fact that if there is to be.... I would argue that it's not a matter of if there needs to be a coalition of middle powers. I think that even in the last three months, we've seen a deterioration of the American hegemony. We're now in a position where perhaps the only alternative to being able to have a rules-based global order is a coalition of middle powers. Canada needs to be one of the leaders in that.

From our experiences—many have mentioned Mulroney's actions against apartheid during the 1980s, or you could look at the Suez crisis in the 1950s—there were times when Canada has stepped up, and we do have respect in what we do. This is another time when we have to do that.

Yes, it's about ensuring that those middle powers in our coalition are going to maintain certain standards, or that we're going to support them in building them and perhaps moving from quasi-democracy to democracy, but at the same time, it's also about us trying to.... I think some wise person once described this as a strawberry field where strawberries are going to pop up in different locations. In this case it's solutions popping up, but there's a root at the bottom that's connecting them all. That root is the values we have, but it's also Canada's ability to build those trusted relationships.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

Thank you, and thanks for the strawberry analogy. I think we were very hub-and-spoke. Washington was really the centre, and it all linked through Washington. I think the global south certainly needs to have those roots connecting them all.

Ms. Le Roy, I want to go back to you as well, because you really emphasized in your remarks that it is in Canada's interest to be doing this kind of democracy work. Not everybody sees a connection between supporting a political party in country X and Canada's national interest. Could you maybe elaborate a bit on that?

[Monika Le Roy]

The number of questions I've fielded already about the relationship between trade and whether we should be doing democracy work I think answers that question. It's better for us to be building economic partnerships and ties with countries that are going to respect the treaties they sign and are going to be financially transparent and ethical in terms of co-operation and operation.

This means engaging with governments that have financial oversight committees or the capacity within their financial oversight committees to understand how their government budgets are being spent and where that money is in fact coming from. This is working with OIG's offices and audit and rule-of-law structures. This creates more conducive opportunities for us to increase trade.

It's also security partnerships. Venezuela, I think, is a really great example. I know that what's happened in the last few months has been very controversial, but I think that in Canada we forget that Venezuela is in fact a threat to our peace and security here. Venezuela's gangs are using Canadian ports to transfer drugs. They're using Canadian casinos and banks to launder money.

The refugee and the immigration crisis of that country, with the proportion of almost a third of its 30-million person population, has destabilized the region, and it is the largest source of migrants moving into the United States. You also have a country in the western hemisphere that has created a foothold for Russian military and for Chinese military and Chinese surveillance technology in our country. They're also a transit point that has linked Hezbollah into the region and into the hemisphere. With these pieces, if we are not paying attention to democracy, the consequences are high.

[The Chair, Liberal, Fayçal El-Khoury]

Thank you, Ms. Le Roy.

I would like to invite Ms. Kronis to take the floor for five minutes, please.

[Tamara Kronis, Conservative, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

I had intended a totally different line of questioning, but based on what Ms. Le Roy just said about the degree to which foreign governments are actually sinking their claws into Canada in order to do the things you've talked about, I'd like to ask you to elaborate on that a bit. I would also ask you to elaborate on what we need to do to put a stop to that.

[Monika Le Roy]

I'm going to quickly answer your question from last time in two sentences.

Ideally, it should be the Government of Canada creating a doctrine. Over the past 25 years—and there are members of this committee who have participated in a number of these processes—we've tried to do this five times, and we have not yet succeeded in doing so. Until that time when we can come up with that, I would encourage and invite, through the chair, members of this committee to encourage and call on the government to develop this process, because parliamentarians can and should have oversight of the democratic engagement we have.

I can speak to Venezuela because I spent a number of years working on the crisis. It is open knowledge in Canada, through some of our investigation capacities, that Venezuelan illicit funds have been in our banking and our casino systems for over a decade. The capacity is that there's been a lack of political commitment and ability to respond to that. The Ontario police and the Toronto police have publicly acknowledged the presence of Venezuelan gangs. There was an announcement—I think about eight months ago—that there was a group of gang members that was actually turned back at the border.

These are issues that do come up quite frequently and sort of get lost in the noise of everything else that is going on. If you look at the crisis in Venezuela, you're talking about a situation that I started working on in 2013, and every single year we would be asked, “Can it get worse?” The answer was that it couldn't possibly get worse, yet we are looking at it 13 years later and it is functionally a failed state that has required foreign intervention to somewhat stem some semblance of stability.

[Tamara Kronis, Conservative, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

Given that you've been inside of government and that I've just heard you say that Parliament should be creating a doctrine that should be debated in the House of Commons and that the executive branch of our government would then follow in terms of dealing with some of these situations, whose responsibility is it? Are the questions or the call to do this to the Prime Minister, or to...?

I stand up in the House on a regular basis. I stood up in the House a few weeks ago and said that the IRGC is in Canada. We have people going missing. We have murders happening on Canadian soil. We have money being laundered through Canadian institutions. The ball is very clearly being dropped. We get no responses to our questions.

My question for you is this: How do we demand better? What do organizations like yours, who are on the outside watching all of this happen around the world, have to say to us in terms of stopping the talk and stopping the platitudes and actually getting to work to be able to keep Canadians safe domestically?

[Monika Le Roy]

Domestically, your counterpart is the Department of Public Safety and the various affiliated entities that report through Public Safety. Internationally, which is the work we are talking about today, that would be going through Global Affairs Canada. Those two should be talking to one another.

I believe this committee is also having a study on foreign interference that's happening simultaneously to this process. I believe someone from the Montreal Institute for Global Security will be.... They just published a report specifically on this. I would defer to the experts who have been focused on foreign interference in Canada to better answer that question.

[Tamara Kronis, Conservative, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

Thanks very much.

Do I have any time left?

[The Chair, Liberal, Fayçal El-Khoury]

You have 40 seconds. Go ahead.