Mr. Speaker, I recently met with a delegation of the Canadian's Christian community and representatives of the Canadian Tibetan and Chinese Uyghur communities, along with officials from the Federation for a Democratic China. This diverse delegation shared one major concern, the Conservative government's new-found relationship with China.
Canadians were not only concerned when the Prime Minister gave the go-ahead for the Chinese state-owned company, CNOOC, basically a corporate extension of the Chinese Communist Party, to purchase Canadian oil and gas giant Nexen, but they were equally concerned about the secretive Canada-China foreign investment protection agreement.
As the NDP's critic for human rights, I am troubled by the human rights record of China but also of CNOOC itself. CNOOC has been implicated in a number of very concerning human rights violations of Tibetans and Uyghur, of supporting torture and imprisonment of Falun Gong members, as well as directly abusing workers in Burma.
Just how repressive must a regime be before the government will refuse to do business with it?