Mr. Speaker, in May, I asked the government a specific question about how the Liberals respond to foreign policy challenges. In particular, I compared their response to events that took place in Gaza and events that took place in Iran. The striking contrast between the government's response in these cases was and is quite revealing.
In response to events in Gaza, the Liberals called for an independent investigation into those events. What happened in this case was the so-called return march, where at a Hamas-organized event, people tried violently to cross the border and go into Israel. There was a response from the Israeli military, and there was debate internationally about the nature of that response and the appropriateness of it.
Of course, like any free democracy, Israel subjects itself to criticism and has its own domestic investigative mechanism to review the kinds of activities the armed forces undertake. However, the Liberal government made a choice at that time, in its response, to call for an international investigation, implying a lack of trust in the domestic mechanisms that existed.
Meanwhile, around the same time, there was a Canadian citizen who was killed in an Iranian prison, and the government said in response to this that it wanted the Iranian government to conduct an investigation.
My simple question for the parliamentary secretary is why in one case, in the case of our friend and ally, a free democracy, it called for an independent international investigation, and why, in the other case, it called for a domestic investigation. We did not hear an answer then, and I would like to hear an answer from the government now.