Madam Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the hon. member and my friend from Durham.
This is an important motion, one I am glad my colleagues have brought forward. We are talking about ISIS's crimes against humanity. We are commemorating the work and efforts by Nadia Murad, and even her sentiment is captured in the motion, about what happened to the ISIS women and girls who were used as sex slaves. The member for Calgary Nose Hill described in detail the horrific existence, injuries and impacts that rape, as a weapon, had on culture and society, particularly how it traumatized the lives of these women and girls. We need to act upon that.
It is one thing to have a Prime Minister call himself a feminist, but we have to take action. If we want to stop genocide, we need to have plan on how to do that. It is one thing to talk about the responsibility to protect. It is another thing to call an atrocity a genocide, such as ISIS committed against the people in the Syrian and Iraqi regions. We need to ensure that we stand with them and that those who committed these atrocities and crimes against humanity are held accountable.
I have had the privilege over the last number of years to work with the Yazidi community in Canada. It was shocking to hear the stories of the women and girls who were sex slaves, They have come to Canada for refuge, asylum and our protection and are glad to be here, even though they still have family members in refugee camps in the region who cannot get out. We need to be of more help to them on that basis.
It is disturbing when I talk to them and hear the stories they are experiencing right in Canada. A lady in London, Ontario, a Yazidi refugee, got on a bus with her captor, who was an ISIS terrorist. He had bought her, used her and then sold her again like she was property, like livestock. He is here under the so-called Syrian refugee program. He lied to get into Canada. We cannot allow this individual and his family to stay here. First, he is an ISIS terrorist. Second, he committed atrocities as part of the ISIS genocide. Third, he entered Canada on false pretenses.
Another lady has had the same experience in Winnipeg. An ISIS terrorist, who is on the streets, was recognized by one of his Yazidi sex slaves. She too has talked to the police. She has not talked about it in the media, like the other case in London, but she saw him face to face in Canada.
It is disturbing that these people have snuck into Canada under the Syrian refugee program and have lied about who they are. They were definitely part of ISIS. Then there are Canadians who have returned after the war started going sideways. They had joined ISIS and fought in Iraq and Syria. We know of some who are being held today by the Kurdish forces in northern Syria.
Muhammad Ali has been on Global TV, talking about how he wants to come back to Canada. His wife lived for sometime in Vancouver. He would like to come to Canada with their children, but they are in detention. He admits to being part of ISIS and to committing atrocities, while fighting against Canada and our allies in the region, yet we are offering him consular services. Those crimes were committed in Iraq and Syria. When Canadians travel abroad and commit crimes abroad, they should be charged, prosecuted and brought to justice in those jurisdictions, just as we witnessed this past week when a young girl, who wrote graffiti on a historic site in Thailand, was arrested for it.
If they do the crime there, they will do the time there. Many Canadians are incarcerated around the world in various prisons, because they committed crimes in those countries. However, we still offer them consular services, but we do not need to make a case for them to return to Canada, like consular services did in talking to Muhammad Ali on how to get back to Canada and how to get his passport in order.
Consular services also spoke to Jihadi Jack, Jack Letts, a British citizen. He became famous in 2014-15, promoting ISIS and even talking about using the heads of his victims as soccer balls and the atrocities he committed. He has a father of Canadian citizenship and wants to be returned to Canada, even though he has never lived here. Consular services are helping him with a passport application. It just does not make any sense at all.
I am proud of the record we had under the Conservative government. We committed our Canadian Armed Forces to help our allies fight against ISIS. We went over there. We put our CF-18s in the fight, bombing ISIS positions in Iraq and even in Syria. We put over 200 trainers on the ground to help the Kurdish peshmerga become better equipped. We gave them equipment plus training so they were more effective soldiers. We helped save lives and protected those vulnerable communities.
It was great that we were able to do that. We provided our surveillance aircraft, two CP-140 Auroras. We were not just providing targeting and looking for intelligence on the ground on where ISIS fighters were located, but we were there supporting our allies. We also had a Polaris refueller aircraft to help with the air attack.
Our air task force there has done great work. How did the Liberals treat the air task force? One of the very first things the Liberals did when they came to power was to pull our CF-18s out of the fight. Shame on the Liberals. Kurdish peshmerga, the Kurdish regional government, said that those planes helped save lives and helped ensure that not just Canadian troops on the ground were safe, but that the Kurdish peshmerga fighters were safe as well. We were destroying ISIS targets, ensuring it could not continue on in committing its atrocities. We completely eliminated its offensive capabilities.
Then the Liberal government took out one of our surveillance aircraft, cutting that by 50%. It brought one of our Auroras home. Adding insult to injury, the Liberals took away the danger pay for our air task force that was set up in Kuwait. Some of our guys on the ground there saw their pay cut between $1,500 and $1,800 a month, even though they were still in theatre. Even though they were part of Operation Impact, they were treated differently.
After Conservatives embarrassed the government, the Minister of National Defence had to climb down on that and reinstate that danger pay, bringing in a new policy. It was our Conservative government that stood up for our troops, for the people who were fighting ISIS.
We had many successes through that whole process, including having boots on the ground. We had snipers in theatre. We had special operations forces working. We trained over 1,100 Kurdish peshmerga.
The Liberals changed the mission. We have not had a briefing on the mission in over a year. We are going to receive one, finally, next month, but it is well long overdue. For a government that says that it is transparent, we should see more about this rather than waiting until the last minute, before the mission has expires in March 2019 and has to be renewed.
What it comes down is that we have people like Abu Huzaifa who is in Canada. He is a Canadian, he went abroad and enlisted with ISIS. He is 23 years old. We have not heard anything from the government about him being arrested. Abu Huzaifa was part of ISIS. He admitted to it on a New York Times podcast, called Caliphate, put out a few months ago. All of this is on the public record. He admitted to it in a CBC interview as well.
We do not see anything from the government about arresting these individuals. The Liberals always like to talk about how the Conservatives never arrested any of them either. We have to remember that the fight was going on. It was a hot conflict until the end of 2016 when everybody started coming home. We know that Abu Huzaifa did not even come back until the winter of 2016.
We expect better from the government. We are here to ensure we are acting on terrorism. A Conservative government will do just that to ensure Canadians are safe, that we act on protecting people who are vulnerable to genocide.