Mr. Speaker, I come before the House tonight with a weighty issue. The question I originally asked was some months ago, and it related to the fact that the government bought Broadway tickets for a representative of the corrupt government of Maduro in Venezuela. That was wrong, but I want to get to the heart of the matter. What is the Liberal government going to do to help the people of Venezuela? What material action is the government going to take?
Why is this important? I have a large Venezuelan community in my riding and in the broader community of Calgary. It is very vibrant. There was just a Venezuelan Cultural Day celebration. My friend, Miguel Arturo, is a proud member of that community. What gets to my heart is that when I talk to him and members of his community, as much as they are proud of their heritage, they are panicked. They are beside themselves because of what is happening in their country.
What is happening in Venezuela right now should light the world on fire. We should not be looking at this as a partisan issue. What this corrupt dictator has done to that country should be a concern to all Canadians who believe in democracy, the rights of parliamentarians, and human rights in general. Economic collapse aside, the reality is that parliamentarians are being violently harassed. The parliament now is illegitimate.
My friend told me that there were regional elections for the governor of each of the states on October 15. The elections were held without supervision or audits, and anyone who might have been elected from an opposition party basically had to swear fealty or be approved by the illegitimate parliament.
I was at the Inter-Parliamentary Union meetings that took place last week. It was astounding to watch what happened to the woman from Venezuela who brought forward a motion for an emergency debate on this crisis, in a multilateral situation. I am speculating, but I think she was harassed into removing that resolution from the floor.
If Canada is going to have a place in the world, we have to respond to Venezuela, and I would like the government to do this. I would like the government to stand up at the United Nations and ask it to appoint a humanitarian aid coordinator. It is a sort of back-door, easy way of getting the United Nations to acknowledge that there is a humanitarian crisis. It would also acknowledge the fact that aid organizations cannot deliver aid to Venezuela right now. Any aid shipments are either being turned away or expropriated and distributed to people who are loyal to the government.
We have to realize that this is not just a quasi-crisis. There is no food in Venezuela. There are no human rights. People who are any sort of political dissident are being rounded up. This is happening in a country that was once economically viable and that was once marginally peaceful. It is in our backyard.
There is a huge community of Venezuelans in Canada who expect us to put our money where our mouths are as legislators.When we stand up and say that Canadians or Canadian legislators support human rights, it is not about nice words. We have to take action. My plea to the parliamentary secretary, who is a reasonable human being, is to show the Venezuelan community what the government is going to do as a tangible action to support them.