Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague from Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan for bringing forward this motion today, allowing us to pronounce ourselves, which we will do later in a vote, on how the Iranian regime can never be trusted and denounce it for its continuous human rights violations and for the destabilizing impact it has in the Middle East today.
We have talked at length about how the Iranian regime continues to violate human rights on a scale we have not seen in years, including imprisoning Canadians, such as Maryam Mombeini, the widow of Professor Kavous Seyed-Emami, a Canadian who was murdered in Tehran in the notorious Evin prison. He was captured and then beaten to death while he was incarcerated in Iran.
We have talked about how we need to make sure that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force is not just sanctioned but listed as a terrorist organization, not just because of what it does in Iran, but because of the evil it spreads throughout the Middle East. It trains the Shia militia in Iraq, and it supports Hezbollah in Syria. It supports the Syrian army in carrying out all its genocides under Bashar al-Assad during the conflict in Syria, and it also provides the command and control for the Houthis in the destabilizing civil war that they are committing in Yemen. Never mind what it is trying to do to Israel.
Again, we have to condemn Ayatollah Khamenei for his ongoing attack by words right now against the State of Israel, how he wants to carry out a genocide against the Jewish people, and how he calls Israel a “cancerous tumor” that must be removed from the landscape of geography. He believes that the State of Israel should be pushed right into the Mediterranean Sea. That can never happen. That is why it is important that we continue to stand strong against Ayatollah Khamenei.
We have a situation where the Government of Canada is engaging in normalizing relations through the diplomatic corps with Iran and actually talking about reopening our embassy in Tehran. Two meetings have already taken place this year between high-level diplomats. People from the Iranian regime have actually been here in Ottawa meeting with Global Affairs Canada.
We cannot allow that to happen just because the government wants to do business with an organization, a country, that has carried out capital punishment, including under President Rouhani, at an alarming rate, second only to China in the number of people killed. This is a regime that continues to violate the human rights of ethnic and religious minorities. I have been talking with the Baha'i. I have been talking with the People's Mojahedin Organization and with the Kurds in Iran.
It is disgusting what is going on there now and how the regime is treating the Kurdish community within Iran. It has already isolated the Kurdish community from an economic standpoint so that it is not allowed to export or import any goods. People from the Kurdish community step forward and try to move goods over international boundaries. Those porters, called kulbars, are like Sherpas. If they are caught, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard shoots them on sight. It is not an arrest. It is not a seizure of goods. It is killing the individuals who are trying to keep food on the tables of the people in the Kurdish region of Iran. That, again, speaks to how notorious and disgusting the Iranian regime is.
We on this side of the House do not believe that we need to re-engage with Iran. We have to continue to stand strong against it. We have to make sure that it is isolated, that sanctions are maintained, and that we do not allow billions of dollars to flow back into the Iranian regime, which has allowed it to create this unholy alliance with Russia and Bashar al-Assad in Syria and cause all this heartache and turmoil in the region.
I have restarted, along with my friend from Scarborough—Guildwood, Canadian Parliamentarians for Human Rights and Democracy in Iran. We can work together as parliamentarians across party lines to ensure that human rights and democracy are respected, that we continue to denounce the Iranian Islamic republic, and that Ayatollah Khamenei and President Rouhani are sanctioned under the Magnitsky Law the way they should be.