Madam Speaker, I raise my hands to the member for Edmonton Strathcona and thank her for all her advocacy on protecting women and girls across the world, in Canada and in the House.
There has been an alarming rollback of women's rights around the world. In my community of Port Moody—Coquitlam, it came right home to our families with the killing of Mahsa Amini. It was unbearable for thousands of Iranian Canadian women in my community who know first-hand the cruel Iranian regime that limited their freedoms and forced them to leave their homeland for safety. These women carry the deepest sorrow, yet their resolve continues. Their brave voices of resistance continue in Vancouver almost weekly.
While the world sits by doing nothing for these women, Ahoo Daryaei was recently punished for standing proud in her underwear on a campus in Iran to protest the mistreatment of women. She was labelled as sick and was taken to a psychiatric ward, her rights and dignity stripped because she is a woman, just as women have been stripped of their dignity for centuries. It is all rooted in misogyny.
In Palestine, women and children disproportionately are being killed to carry out a genocide. Palestinians are being treated as if their lives do not matter, and women and children have no defence. The world is failing them. Canada is failing them. In Afghanistan, women are not allowed to speak in public. They have been erased from public life.
There are more countries where women cannot receive the most basic of human rights. The list is long. One of the countries we never could have imagined is the United States. I never would have thought that in 2024, women would lose their right to basic health care just because of their sex, but it is happening. As women in the United States face increasing restrictions on their reproductive rights, including access to safe and legal abortions, Canada has an obligation to step forward as an ally to women and to advocate for women and diverse genders. No one would have predicted when the study was taking place and finalized that such discrimination would happen so close to us, just south of the border.
It is important for Canada to be prepared and to do its part to save lives. One of the most tangible ways Canada can help is by making it possible for U.S. women to access abortion services in Canada. This could include expanding the availability of abortion services, particularly in border communities, and ensuring that Canadian health care facilities can accommodate patients travelling from the U.S. The federal government could work with NGOs that could offer logistical assistance, travel coordination and financial aid to U.S. women and girls seeking care in Canada.
An absolute must is for Canada to leverage its position on the global stage to advocate for reproductive rights as human rights. Through international forums like the United Nations, Canada must work to pressure the U.S. to respect and protect these rights. These are the important conversations that the Prime Minister should also be having with the president-elect, who has bragged about overturning Roe v. Wade even though the overturning has proven to be dangerous to women and newborns. Maternal deaths have tripled in the States with an abortion ban, and infant mortality is up 7%. Over 700 more newborns have died since the Supreme Court overturned the life-saving legislation.
New Democrats stand up to say no to the attack on women's bodies and that it cannot make its way north to Canada. All of us must stand on guard, because a Conservative federal government would threaten women's access to safe and trauma-informed abortion. We know that the Liberals will not stop them; they are already failing Canadians by letting Conservative premiers cut access to abortion.
Under Conservative leadership, there have been relentless attempts to restrict reproductive rights, including by Conservatives in the House right now with private members' bills targeting abortion access. The Conservative leader has already used coded language to embolden anti-choice extremists while claiming to avoid the debate. Conservatives have shown they cannot be trusted to defend a woman's right to choose, nor can they be trusted to move toward more—