Mr. Speaker, today is International Women's Day, and it is a day where we celebrate the accomplishments of women and also look at issues that face women, face women's advancement, women's health, women's safety; and I would be remiss if I did not bring up the plight of the Yazidi women within the context of several Middle Eastern conflicts right now.
Earlier in this parliamentary session, I asked the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship if he would categorize or classify what is happening to the Yazidi people as genocide. He declined to answer that. I asked how many Yazidi women had been brought to Canada as part of the Liberals' refugee initiatives. He also declined to answer that.
We cannot turn a blind eye to the violence that is happening against the Yazidi women. I really feel that, if we take it lightly, if we turn a blind eye to it, when we use the term “never again”, it is going to turn into “never mind”. There are reports every day of the rape, sexual slavery, and atrocities committed to children. These are girls who are six or seven years old. I can pull out numerous newspaper articles and talk about how women are being used and treated as a subspecies. They are not even being treated as human. They are being treated as less than human.
The impact on this group of people affects everyone around the world. Everybody who is a human being on our planet should be concerned about what is happening to these women in this area, and we need to do more.
I want to highlight and emphasize some of the things that are happening. There have been mass graves found filled with Yazidi women. There are reports that ISIS has established an international sex ring by smuggling captured Yazidi sex slaves. They are being sent to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Chechnya. Women's children who are born while they are in captivity are being killed in front of them. These women are being forced to watch young girls bleed out after being raped multiple times by ISIS soldiers.
On International Women's Day, it is very important for people in the House to understand that throughout history women have been controlled by their body and by their sexuality. It is a very common thing to demean women by using acts of sexual degradation to treat them as less than human or less than whole. It is only societies and cultures that recognize that this is wrong, something we should not celebrate, something we should actively fight against, where we see true gender equality and parity of women.
I ask my colleague, not from a partisan perspective but on International Women's Day, a day when we talk about women—the United Nations has even classified what is happening to the Yazidi people as genocide—if the government will in fact call this what it is, a genocide, and if he will tell Canadians how many Yazidi women have been brought to Canada under the Liberal government's tenure.