Madam Speaker, I congratulate you for resuming your role in the chair.
It is indeed a pleasure to be back in the House of Commons. This is my first speech in the 43rd Parliament, although I took part in question period and in committee of the whole last night. I want to thank the constituents of Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman for putting their trust in me again. I am humbled by their support. This is the sixth time I have been elected, and I always look forward to representing them and being their voice in the chamber.
I am splitting my time with the member for Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill.
This motion by the official opposition is indeed timely, one that I support wholeheartedly and one that deals with a growing concern among Canadians. My riding of Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman has been dealing first-hand with the impacts of our increasingly difficult relationship with China. Earlier our agriculture, beef and pork producers were sanctioned, banned from moving product into the Chinese market. We are still dealing with the restrictions on Canadian canola, and that is having a huge impact on the farming sector in Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman and right across the country. The mismanagement on this file by the Liberals has created the challenges we are now facing in our economy, as well as making it more difficult to work with China when it comes to our national security, and it is affecting our national defence as well.
I have always been a big advocate of standing up for human rights. I brought forward the legislation to recognize the Ukrainian Holodomor as a genocide in this place. I sponsored the bill on the Magnitsky act and making sure we have sanctions in place against corrupt foreign officials who are gross human rights violators. I have been advocating for sometime that Chinese officials responsible for those human rights violations need to be added to Canada's Magnitsky sanctions list.
We know how the Chinese have been behaving. We know the Chinese government has allowed individuals to profiteer by harvesting organs from political prisoners and exporting them around the world. We know that the Chinese government has intentionally targeted practitioners of Falun Dafa, often called Falun Gong, because it does not believe in their right to peaceful assembly or to worship or meditate in their own way. The government imprisons them, harvests their organs and tissues, and exports them all around the world. That, to me, is disgusting, and we need to put a stop to it. That is one of the things that this committee could look at, these human rights violations, such as how Tibetan monks have been treated by the Chinese government or how often Tibetan monks, in protest, will go out into the streets and light themselves on fire.
We have seen that Chinese Muslims, the Uighurs, have been targeted as well and imprisoned. Right now there is a smear campaign going on against them by the state of China itself. The regime in Beijing is discrediting minority and religious groups within China. That again is something that this committee could drill down on by allowing the different organizations and faith groups to appear in committee and talk about the human rights abuses that they have been facing. We have recently been witnessing the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong and know that the Chinese military massed itself on the borders of Hong Kong to threaten the citizens of Hong Kong, saying that if they did not do what it wanted, citizens could face military oppression or possibly see Hong Kong turned into a police state. That threat is still there. Trying to appease China or normalize relations with it, to me, is very disheartening.
We know that the Minister of National Defence, the Prime Minister and the former minister of foreign affairs have not viewed China as a threat, yet we have heard over and over again that our allies, both in the Five Eyes and the two eyes, NORAD being the two eyes, have grave concern over allowing a Chinese company like Huawei to have access to our 5G network.
We already know of the challenges for other countries that had adopted Huawei as their main Wi-Fi provider, with its backdoor access to their information systems putting at risk not only national security but the protection of individuals, who were having to make sure their identities were not harvested and circulated through cyberspace or that their personal information was not stolen to be used for more nefarious reasons.
We recently had the Halifax security forum. The Minister of National Defence was there. On November 22, he said:
We don't consider China as an adversary. We do have two Canadians that have been arbitrarily detained in China and we ask China for their expeditious release and that's extremely important to us.
We have now learned that those two Canadians will be facing national security charges in a trial in Beijing.
Right after the Minister of National Defence quit speaking, Robert O'Brien, the national security adviser to the United States, got up and said, “The Huawei Trojan horse is frightening, it's terrifying.”
Of course, we all know there is always a huge U.S. congressional presence at the Halifax security forum, and CBC reported on November 23 that “Democratic and Republican senators...spoke with one voice, saying the dangers of proceeding outweigh the benefits.”
Senator Angus King said:
We differ sometimes on issues, but not on this one. The risks of Huawei coming into your country far outweigh any benefits.
Therefore, we are looking at protecting our systems, our financial and transportation infrastructures, and making sure that things operate well, never mind protecting our Canadian government and our national security.
Why would we want to allow a company like Huawei, which often provides intel to the Government of China through a backdoor access, into our Wi-Fi system?
Aside from the national security threat of having Huawei become part of our Internet system here through the 5G network, we also need to look at the military threat.
When I spoke here last night, I talked about the buildup of the military presence of Russia and that the rear admiral who is in charge of the northern fleet for the Russian Federation is anticipating a conflict in Canada's Arctic. I can tell members that if they look at China right now, which is not an Arctic nation, it has an Arctic policy called the “polar silk road”. It intends to make use of Canadian and Russian waters for transit. We would think that in itself, if it got approval, with the disappearing sea ice, would enable more trade up there, which could be a good thing. However, why would China, which is not an Arctic nation, currently have two polar research vessels and six People's Liberation Army navy icebreakers?
We are talking about the Government of China having heavy icebreakers. We are talking about the capability not to transit but to wage war. These are combat ships. Therefore, we have to be prepared. I have not heard anything from the government on how we are preparing to defend our sovereignty in the Arctic.
That is another thing we can talk about when this all-party committee is struck. We can get down to the essentials of Arctic sovereignty, protecting the Canadian domain, and making sure we are keeping China in check as it does things like militarize the South China Sea, as it continues to rattle sabres with neighbours like Japan and South Korea and continues to support North Korea in its efforts to build ballistic missiles. These are things that we have to take a serious look at.
I know that in 2019, the United States put China on its worldwide threat assessment. It is very concerned about China's military capabilities and the concentration of power within the regime in Beijing. We have to make sure that we are standing up for Canada first, for human rights and for the rule of law.