Mr. Speaker, I move that the 12th report of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, presented to the House on Monday, June 5, be concurred in.
Today, I am seeking the agreement of the House on the 12th report of the justice committee, a report which condemns the violence of the Taliban regime, affirms that it is not the legitimate government of Afghanistan and expresses the belief that the Taliban must remain a listed terrorist organization. This matter is particularly timely, for reasons that I will explain shortly.
As 2023 draws to a close, the world is seeing a proliferation of violent conflicts that merit our closer scrutiny. I will focus my remarks today mainly on Afghanistan, of course, but I do think the wider context is important to set out first.
The further invasion of Ukraine by Russia continues. We now see clear evidence that genocide and other war crimes have been perpetrated by the invading armies, at the direction and with the full support of the Putin regime. This regime practises the large-scale abduction of Ukrainian children, allows its soldiers to use sexual violence as a weapon of war and indiscriminately targets civilians for the purpose of inflicting maximal terror. For the residual “end of history” crowd, this war should have broken any remaining illusions about what kind of a world we are still living in.
This fall, the terrorist organization Hamas launched a horrific and unprecedented attack on Israel. Like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, this attack by Hamas has included child stealing, sexual violence and the intentional targeting and terrorizing of civilians. Hamas did not act in isolation; it has received constant support from the terrorist IRGC, the Iranian regime's weapon of terror. The Iranian regime has long been recognized as a state sponsor of terror through its support of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Syrian regime, Houthi rebels in Yemen, extremist militias in Iraq and others. The regime uses proxies in an attempt to shelter itself from direct retaliation, but we should be under no illusions about its responsibility.
When it comes to war and terrorism, at least in the Middle East, all roads lead back to Tehran, and this is a key reason Conservatives have long called for the listing of the IRGC as a terrorist organization, particularly since the House of Commons adopted my motion calling for that listing more than five years ago. The Iranian regime is committing grotesque atrocities in its attacks against Israelis and others that parallel the atrocities that the Russian regime is responsible for. These two regimes have been steadily increasing their co-operation, sharing technology and offering each other various other forms of strategic support.
Meanwhile, the people of Burma are fighting for their freedom. Following a military coup, the dissident democracy movement has established effective dissident institutions and strengthened itself through growing ethnic reconciliation efforts that include the long-persecuted Rohingya people. Burma's democratic forces are facing the illegitimate coup leaders in the Tatmadaw that occupies their capital, and the Tatmadaw is increasingly escalating its atrocities, also targeting women, children and civilians in general. The Tatmadaw, the military that claims but does not effectively control the territory or exercise legitimate sovereignty over Burma, is also collaborating with the Putin regime, sharing weapons and technology, and allowing it to avoid western sanctions.
I met recently with leaders from various communities in Central and South America to talk about human rights issues here in our hemisphere, and it was a strikingly familiar message: persistent abuse of human rights by authoritarian regimes, this time with roads leading back to Havana, including the targeting of civilians and escalating co-operation between the Cuban and Venezuelan regimes, on the one hand, and the governments of Russian and Iran, on the other. One demonstration of this growing association is that Cuba is actually sending soldiers to fight for Russia during its invasion of Ukraine. It is, I think, not nearly widely known enough that Cuba is effectively participating in sending its own soldiers into Russia's genocidal invasion. The Government of Venezuela is now threatening its neighbour Guyana, holding a sham referendum recently to justify potential aggression. The Maduro regime is further stepping up its pressure on its neighbour after the discovery of additional oil reserves in Guyanese territory.
There are Russia, Iran, Burma, Cuba, Venezuela, and to this list we could add others, such as North Korea, Eritrea and, most critically, the Government of the PRC. The Communist regime in Beijing controls the world's most populous nation and second-largest economy, and this regime is working overtime to overturn the concept of a democratic rules-based order and replace it with a dynamic in which oppressed domestic populations and vulnerable neighbours can be threatened and dominated at will by regimes whose only necessary justification is power.
The free and democratic nations that uphold doctrines of universal human rights rooted in universal human dignity must struggle, and struggle successfully, against this emerging axis of revisionist imperialist authoritarian powers. We must struggle for the rule of law and for the greater recognition of universal human rights against these powers and principalities for whom the exercise of raw power requires no moral justification. This is the new cold war. The string of events that we see around the world are not random, unrelated occurrences. They are not simply a collection of bad coincidences. They are, rather, the result of strategic co-operation among nations that want a different future for the world than the free and democratic future that we desire for our children and grandchildren.
Struggling successfully in this new cold war requires us to invest in our military, to build up our munitions productions capacity, to support people who are fighting for their own freedom around the world, to decisively isolate terrorist organizations, to stand with our allies and to strategically engage the swing states of the 21st-century global conflict through strengthening trade and other forms of partnership with the global south. We must do these things, and we must do them persistently over time. Lifting the new iron curtain will require a renewed iron will.
In these challenging times, I believe we can prevail, but I do not believe we will prevail necessarily. We will prevail if and only if we make the smart decisions that are required to defend our security interests and our way of life. Fancy socks, photo ops and cuts to our military are not going to help us in the midst of this new cold war. Serious times require serious leaders. Our country needs true statesmanship. It needs a will to confront hard truths in the pursuit of a more just, human and democratic victory.
Afghanistan is one more front in this global struggle. In the fall of 2021, a little over two years ago and before many other aspects of this escalating cold war had taken place, Afghanistan was abandoned by the west and then overrun by the Taliban, an internationally recognized terrorist group. The western pullout from Afghanistan was not the result of battlefield defeats. Rather, it was the result of that pernicious virus in which foreign policy debates in the democratic world seem uniquely susceptible: fatigue. Many of us are too optimistic in wishing to believe that our struggles for freedom and justice will be quick and easy. We react to initial needs with eagerness, but our interest tapers off as the events in question are no longer in the news. Eventually, people start to ask themselves, “Why is that still going on? Is that thing over there still happening?” Fatigue in foreign policy explains the odd habit among free nations of sometimes abandoning a task when it is almost complete. While it may be psychologically understandable, this is strategically inexplicable, allowing the reversal of critical gains at the point at which most of the work has, in fact, already been done.
In Afghanistan, by the time of the pullout, the Afghan army was able to fight back against the Taliban with relatively limited western air support. Far from constituting a forever war, limited backup support at a relatively low cost was sustaining the Afghan army and the Afghan government. In a sense, the task was almost complete. The Afghans were fighting for their own future in circumstances that required some, but limited, western support. Arbitrarily pulling these last elements of western support created a hole in the dam, and the Taliban flooded in.
Free peoples must not allow themselves to be overcome by fatigue when steadfastness and strategic patience can instead finish the job. If we needed to learn that lesson again, I hope we apply it in today's ongoing struggles in other places. Our strategic foes in every part of the world, particularly in the Kremlin, hope that we will be overcome by fatigue and abandon our posts in more countries, opening the door to the further expansion of injustice and tyranny.
The invocation of fatigue is particularly striking to me when used to explain the behaviours of countries or individuals not actually involved in or doing the fighting, which was the position of many countries by 2021. Even countries that were involved were committing far fewer troops than many other theatres around the world. If some felt fatigue about the length of the conflict in Afghanistan, or if we feel fatigue today because of how long the war has gone on in Ukraine, then imagine how the people of Afghanistan and Ukraine felt and feel. If they, in the midst of the intensity and violence of their struggles, are prepared to persist in their own bloody fights for their freedom, then the least we can do is have their back. If we needed to learn again about the dangers of this so-called fatigue, then I hope Afghanistan has taught us well. Afghanistan was abandoned, so fell to the complete control of a terrorist organization. This terrorist organization, though having its own particular genesis and ideological orientation, has unsurprisingly fallen quickly into partnership with the world's authoritarian block.
The motion before us is timely because the Taliban's ambassador has just been accepted and received in Beijing, as both sides cultivate ties with each other based on shared antipathy toward the west, shared disdain for international human rights norms and a narrow calculation of immediate interests. Formally speaking, it does not make sense that an ostensibly Muslim organization would aggressively court a regime currently committing genocide and seeking to replace in their homeland the Muslim Uyghur people, but the new cold war reality is one in which authoritarian powers notionally conflicting ideologies co-operate against the west, not for ideology but for power.
The temporary loss of Afghanistan to this authoritarian block has been a significant setback, but on this side of the House, we believe the west must remain resolute in its support for the Afghan people and its recognition that they desire and deserve that their freedom and democracy be restored. If we accept Taliban control of Afghanistan, if we accede to this violent takeover, then we would be leaving the Afghan people to a fate we would never contemplate for ourselves. The Afghan people around the world are now mobilizing to challenge the Taliban in all domains. Democratic nations should be prepared to pursue strengthened dialogue and collaboration with democratic opposition and resistance groups, working to keep the dream alive.
Authoritarian regimes are often weaker than they appear. The nature of repressive regimes is that evident elements of weakness cannot be discussed directly by those who can see them most clearly, which is why predicting the moment of their fall is always very difficult.
Without popular legitimacy, these regimes are brittle and can disintegrate unexpectedly. Bringing about that disintegration requires supportive engagement with democratic opposition groups and unrelenting pressure on the regime.
At this time, the House must consider what we can meaningfully do to promote democratization in a place like Afghanistan. It seems that often in these sorts of situations, we perceive a binary choice that is in fact a false choice. In the aftermath of 9/11, democracy promotion was discussed particularly in terms of western military action. The sense was that if the west wanted to promote democracy, that involved directly pushing the advancement of democracy through military action. Of course, that approach was very costly.
Critics of this approach have posited as the primary alternative a complete “live and let live” approach, leaving in place anti-democratic regimes, tolerating them, engaging with them, and naively seeking the kind of close relations that make us vulnerable to strategic trade disruption and foreign interference.
Importantly, there are many other alternatives for dealing with regimes we do not like, besides the extremes of military intervention or complete tolerance. We can, instead, pursue policies of non-interventionist intolerance. That is, we can firmly oppose anti-democratic regimes at the diplomatic level, especially in international forums. We can use terrorist listing, sanctions and other tools to punish bad actors, and we can structure our trade relations to avoid situations of strategic vulnerability for us while seeking to deprive our adversaries of the material capacity to oppose us. We can also support opposition and civil society groups. This combination creates many points of pressure on anti-democratic regimes, pressure that makes them less sustainable over time.
The shock and awe of direct external military intervention produces quick, though not always durable, results. Sustained pressure, non-interventionist intolerance, takes time. It seeks to tip the scales as much as we can toward freedom and democracy, acknowledging that we in the west do not have limitless capacity to change the world, but we do have some capacity to change the world. This strategy seeks to use the capacity that we have in ways that are prudent and effective.
Strategic and financial pressure does not usually have a predictable timeline associated with it, but it produces results when the combination of external and internal pressure becomes too much for the regime to hold. This strategy has a good track record. It is, after all, what won us the last Cold War, when the free democratic world finally developed the necessary clarity and resolve to squeeze the Soviet empire and bring about its disintegration. Such success was possible, though it was never inevitable. It required investment, discipline and confidence over time. The same will be required to achieve victory in this cold war.
During the French Revolution, the great Admiral Horatio Nelson said, of England's relations with the revolutionary and violent French Republic, “although we might one day hope to be at peace with France, we must ever be at war with French principles.” He meant that, of course, in the context of the revolution.
A similar situation should prevail today as it relates to the Taliban. Although we are not at war with the Taliban, we are at war with Taliban principles. We oppose the things they stand for and we oppose normalization. In a world that is more interconnected than ever, normalization of relations with extremist terrorist groups obviously makes us more vulnerable. Normalization undermines the efforts of opposition groups and effectively provides terrorist organizations with more resources that they can use against us and against their own people.
A policy of sustained pressure on the Taliban and on other bad actors aligns with the aspirations of the Afghan people and of all people everywhere. The greatest strategic advantage that free democracies have is that they are offering a system that the people living in countries controlled by our strategic adversaries actually want. Sustained pressure is not going to impose change from outside. It will rather create the conditions that allow the Afghan people to eventually seize control of their own destiny once again.
In the meantime, we must also maintain and strengthen engagement with the Afghan people in other ways, including through looking for innovative tools to provide information and education to people living inside Afghanistan who are barred from attending school. I know all members are horrified by the policies of gender apartheid that are in place in Afghanistan and that prevent girls from going to school. We need to be thinking more creatively about unconventional tools for delivering education and other forms of information to people living in repressive contexts. There are many ways to deliver education outside of a traditional classroom context, ways that are harder for the Taliban or other repressive authorities to interrupt. This is how we must stand with and continue to support the Afghan people.
It is important to add that we are having this debate in a context where the government has been extremely weak on the listing of terrorist organizations in general. Up until now, the Liberal position has remained to support the continuing listing of the Taliban as a terrorist organization, which is good, but Liberals have refused to follow the direction of the House to list the IRGC as a terrorist organization and to list the Wagner Group as a terrorist organization.
These organizations, instruments of terror for the Iranian and Russian regimes respectively, belong on our terror list. The selective listing of terrorist organizations undermines the whole endeavour. All terrorist organizations should be listed as such. Listing these organizations as terrorist entities would shut down their operations in Canada. It would prevent them from operating, fundraising and recruiting here on Canadian soil.
The government has refused to shut down Iranian and Russian regime-backed terrorists by listing these entities. We will continue to push it to add these organizations to the terrorist list and shut down their operations here in Canada. I proposed Bill C-350, a bill that would list the IRGC and take additional measures to support victims of torture, terrorism and extrajudicial killing. We have tried to advance that bill, but the Liberals have twice blocked it from advancing. We will continue to fight to move it forward.
In the time I have remaining, I have one additional observation that I want to make about the current debates happening throughout North America in the context of this new cold war.
Sometimes in the face of authoritarian threats, we in the west have a strange habit of trying to identify authoritarian regimes as “right” or “left”. One dictatorship is deemed “rightist” and another is deemed “leftist”, even if the regimes in question are doing essentially the same things for essentially the same reasons. Efforts to code authoritarian or totalitarian dictatorships as representing either the left or the right, in terms of western democratic political understanding of these terms, miss the more essential point that these ideologies share the essential points in common and always stand far apart from the democratic values embraced by the west.
The coding of foreign dictatorial regimes as “left” or “right” generally reflects their own attempts at self-justification. Regimes that more frequently invoke the iconography of religion and tradition tend to be coded as “right”. Regimes that more frequently speak in terms of workers or equality tend to be coded as “left”. It is not entirely arbitrary how this coding emerges, but it still obscures the fact that these regimes do the same things to their people, work together on common anti-western projects and change the nature of their self-justification when it is convenient.
The Communist regime in Beijing is notionally a left-coded regime, because it calls itself Communist and it is increasingly reintroducing education and discussion about Marxism, but it also increasingly uses Confucian language and icons to justify its rule and promotes a kind of ethnonationalism alongside Marxism. The CCP acts through party committees at big corporations. All of these characteristics underline the problem of identifying it or trying to label it as being of the left or of the right.
Let us consider another example. The regime in Russia is frequently seen as “right” and the regime in Cuba is frequently seen as “left”. Canadian Liberals, who rightly oppose the regime in Moscow, preserve a soft spot for the regime in Havana. Our own Prime Minister shamefully described Castro as “larger than life leader who served his people”. Not only do the Russian and Cuban regimes deploy similar methods, but they are actively collaborating in the invasion of Ukraine. As mentioned, there are Cuban soldiers directly involved in the invasion of Ukraine. Calling one extreme “left” and the other extreme “right” just does not make much sense, given their common approach and collaboration. These are merely choices of the regime to justify itself in the terms it finds most convenient.
Our position, on this side of the House, is that we should, always and everywhere, condemn these extreme statist totalitarian regimes, whether they wear the clothes of the right or the clothes of the left, whether they wear a bit of each or whether they change their clothes from time to time. On this side of the House, we stand for freedom and democracy, always and everywhere, and we stand against authoritarian and totalitarian dictatorships regardless of how they code their politics. We are uniquely consistent on this point.
To my friends in other democracies, it is important to underline that the Putin regime is an authoritarian dictatorship, strongly opposed to our values and our interests, working closely with the regimes in Havana and Tehran and backed up by the CCP. We cannot fight half the cold war. There is no sense in opposing our strategic foes in one theatre while ignoring their advances in another. These are not different fights; these are different parts of the same fight, and we must look squarely on that challenge and face it to preserve the future that we want for our children and grandchildren.
This is why Canadian Conservatives will always stand for freedom. We will stand for freedom here at home, and we will stand for freedom abroad. We will stand for freedom in Afghanistan, and we will stand for freedom in Ukraine. We stand for freedom, always and everywhere.
