Mr. Speaker, it should be uncontroversial, but Christians are among the most persecuted faith community. Christians face violence and persecution on the basis of their religion in over 60% of countries, by some estimates, and yet we encounter in the House on a regular basis the baffling refusal of the government and its fellow travellers in the political far left to even acknowledge the existence of persecution against Christians. The government is generally absent when it comes to international human rights. Its particular hostility toward the Christian community is evident in its lack of response to this vital issue.
I asked the following question to the Prime Minister at the end of the fall sitting.
Mr. Speaker, yesterday the foreign affairs minister finally acknowledged genocide of Yazidis at the hands of Daesh in Syria and Iraq. However, the government has yet to acknowledge genocide against Christian communities in the same areas, Assyrian, Chaldean and other Christians who live in communities alongside Yazidis and have often been treated in exactly the same way.
Will the Prime Minister today also acknowledge the Christian victims of this genocide?
That was my question. In response to the question, the Prime Minister refused to acknowledge the genocide of Christians, but he actually also refused to even mention the experience of Christians. He did not even use the word “Christian” in his response. This was not an accident. I have on three previous occasions asked the Minister of Foreign Affairs to recognize the targeting of Yazidis and Christians by Daesh as genocide. She responded in each of these three cases that yes, they are very concerned about the plight of Yazidis, with no mention of Christians and no mention of the experience of Christian victims of genocide.
The government very often gives verbal acknowledgement without action, but in this case, it repeatedly and by all indications intentionally refused to even give verbal acknowledgement to the persecution of Christians. Its disdain is evident. It has chosen either to completely write off Christians in the next election or to simply be blinded by ideology.
What is the ideology at stake? This far left strain of thought I think assigns value to people and their experience based on whether or not they are considered privileged. If we think they have historically been privileged, then we assign less value to their experience, and if we think they have been historically underprivileged then perhaps we care more. So often these so-called privilege points are assigned in total ignorance of the realities on the ground. The left considers Christians to be historically privileged and also mistakenly sees Christian presence in certain parts of the world as a colonial artifact, so they ignore the genuine suffering of the indigenous people of the Middle East and elsewhere who never enjoyed any privilege in any sense.
Advocates for the rights of Christian minorities around the world are not seeking the extension of domestic debates about the role of religion in public life. They are simply trying to respond to the reality of human suffering, human suffering that generally goes unacknowledged and certainly unaddressed by the government. Human suffering is ignored by the government if the victims happen to be Christian.
It goes without saying that Christians are not the only religious minority facing persecution or that merit our attention, but Christians are the ones most likely to be ignored, and that is unacceptable. Canadians deserve better than that from the government. They deserve a foreign policy characterized by an authentic commitment to humanism and pluralism. An authentic commitment to those values would include a willingness to confront human rights abuses that impact anyone regardless of their faith, and even if they are Christian. It is high time the government stopped ignoring the epidemic of anti-Christian violence around the world and actually made the universal advancement of human rights a priority.