Mr. Speaker, I was not intending to speak to this bill until I realized a few moments ago that it was on the order paper. I join my colleagues from Esquimalt--Juan de Fuca and Calgary West in expressing grave concerns about the bill before the House.
I say that as somebody who is often accused of being a knee-jerk free trader, somebody who believes implicitly in the idea of free trade between civilized nations. We have much to look at in the past 50 years in terms of the improvement of living standards throughout the world by the expansion of the circle of exchange and enterprise permitted by free and orderly trade between countries.
However, free and democratic countries such as Canada and the United States must realize that free markets in and of themselves are not a panacea to all political and economic problems, particularly when it comes to regimes such as the communist dictatorial regime of the People's Republic of China whose very premise is the denial and denigration of the dignity of the human person.
My colleagues from Esquimalt--Juan de Fuca and Calgary West have itemized some of the atrocious abuses committed against human rights by the PRC authorities. It includes the 50 year campaign of cultural genocide in Tibet which has virtually destroyed a people, their culture and their faith and a contemporary campaign against a relatively small and innocuous group, Falun Gong.
However there are other groups which are persecuted in China who receive less notoriety in the west. They receive less press coverage perhaps because we have for some reason less sympathy. The Chinese government has a very deliberate campaign of religious persecution. It persecutes religious minorities, in particular Protestant churches and Catholics loyal to the Pope, namely fully communicating Catholics.
The Chinese constitution ostensibly permits freedom of religion but only for those who practise religion in institutions, that is, in churches formally recognized and ordained by the state which itself excludes most people of faith who refuse to allow their faith to be exercised under the ambit of the state.
Let us make no mistake about why this is. We are talking about a communist regime whose official creed is atheism. It has an official established religion, and that is the rejection and denial of God. When individuals choose to assert their relationship to God, the government intervenes, crushes them, arrests them, throws them into forced labour camps or throws them into prison.
I recently read an autobiography of a humble Chinese Catholic priest who spent 35 of the past 40 years in a series of Chinese labour camps and prisons. He was forced to do disgusting labour of the worst kind and living in the most deplorable circumstances. His experience is not uncommon in the People's Republic of China.
Last week the Vatican released the names of 33 bishops and priests who were detained or are being kept under strict surveillance and forbidden to worship. These are people who were arrested in the last couple of weeks. It is estimated that there are several thousand Protestant and Catholic clergy in similar situations. President Bush during his trip to China made this clear during his time in that country.
For example, Father Lu Genjun, a 39 year old underground Roman Catholic priest was arrested two months in Heibei province and has now apparently been sentenced to three years in a labour camp. His crimes were receiving theology training, being ordained a Roman Catholic priest, refusing to recognize the patriotic association which is the bogus shadow Catholic church contrived by the communist authorities and conducting evangelization.
This kind of thing happens on a daily basis in China for those who seek to publicly express their most deeply held conscientious faith convictions. My hon. colleague from Calgary West talked about the ugly side of the Chinese single child population policy which includes documented cases of forced abortions and sterilizations.
China is ordering one of its remote poverty stricken regions to commit at least 20,000 abortions by the end of the year. This is the state creating an abortion quota. This has been documented by Steven Mosher of the Population Research Institute and formerly the Wall Street Journal . Chinese population authorities, who by the way are funded in part by the United Nations fund for population activities, which in turn is shamefully funded by our own CIDA, set up population control tents in remote provinces in smaller communities. They do a survey and if people there have been having more than their quota of a single child, the authorities will go from house to house and arrest and round up women who may be pregnant with a second or third child.
There are documented and in some cases filmed experiences where mothers have been taken to these so-called population control tents and forced to undergo abortions or sterilizations. This is the kind of regime that we are dealing with.
Steven Mosher, who has written books and articles about this for western journals has said:
If medals were given to nations for committing human rights abuses, China would win the gold every time.
Before we approve the bill I hope that we are fully conscious of the kind of regime which we are seeking to reward with greater economic trade benefits through accession to the WTO.