Mr. Speaker, the current economic challenges will also produce realignments with respect to global expectations.
This week the world's attention will turn to the situation of Tibet and the 50th anniversary of the national uprising within China. The 50 year pursuit of real autonomy and human rights that the Dalai Lama terms a two-way solution within a united China is being marked around the world this week.
We have with us today a number of prominent Tibetan Canadians who are here to remind us, as parliamentarians, of the contribution we now need to make to this decades long impasse.
Canada because of our traditions of peaceful persistence and innovation. Canada because of our successful form of federalism that gives us the insight we can recommend to China, as we have elsewhere, in terms of accommodation and protection of minorities. Canada because of our tradition of human rights ensures we will not ignore where they are at risk.
Just as Tibetan Canadian families here in Canada cancelled their new year's celebration to protest the dire situation, including arrests in Tibet, so too we must ask ourselves urgent questions. If not by the peaceful measures of the Dalai Lama, then how? If not now, when new expectations--