Mr. Speaker, I thank the House for its indulgence in permitting me to speak while seated as a result of my recent injuries.
It was on December 11, 1997, the day after international human rights day, that I posed a question to the Prime Minister concerning the role of the Prime Minister's office during the recent APEC summit in my home city of Vancouver, British Columbia.
I spoke of deep concerns about the events that took place in the time leading up to the summit as well of course as the events that took place during the summit itself.
During the lead-up to the APEC leaders summit which was held in Vancouver at the end of November 1997 it was very clear that the Liberal government refused to put human rights on the agenda of the meeting despite pleas from my colleagues in the New Democratic Party and NGO delegates across Canada to do so.
Its lack of funding for the people's summit for NGO delegates to travel from Asia demonstrated that the government was determined to stifle any dissenting opinions about the role of APEC in promoting human rights, environmental, labour and social standards.
For example, rather than bar Indonesian dictator General Suharto as a war criminal under Canadian immigration law, the Liberal government arranged to meet with him in Indonesia prior to the summit and assure him that his security concerns would be addressed.
We saw during the APEC summit exactly how that promise to General Suharto was kept. Who could forget the images on television of peaceful protesters being pepper sprayed by the RCMP as the motorcades with Suharto and other known human rights abusers drove by?
One of the eye witness accounts from a UBC student, Darren Lund, said it all. He said that it was blatant that excessive force was used against peaceful students. He witnessed as police emptied over 20 large canisters of pepper spray indiscriminately into the crowd. He thought it was a shameful way to show students how economic and corporate interest can supersede fundamental human rights.
There were many other violations. Protesters were detained without charge and forced to sign release conditions that abrogated their right to protest by saying they would not return to UBC during the APEC meetings.
There is the case of Jaggi Singh, who was arrested while walking with his friends to the student union building at UBC. He was forced to the ground by a plain clothes policeman, thrown into an unmarked car with tinted windows and driven away to a detention centre in the outskirts of the city. It sounds more like Argentina in the 1970s than Canada in the 1990s.
Women protesters were being singled out for strip searches in prison. Police forcibly removed the Tibetan flag that was flying at the graduate students' centre. Aboriginal Musquem Chief Gail Sparrow was prevented from speaking on human rights, and law student Craig Jones was arrested for peacefully holding signs that read “free speech”, “democracy” and “human rights”, even though they were posted outside the APEC restricted security zone.
I call today on our government to order an independent public inquiry into these very serious events. An inquiry by the RCMP Public Complaints Commission is not enough. Certainly it can look into the complaints against the RCMP, but we must look into the role that the Prime Minister's Office played, for example, in interfering directly in the agreement that was arrived at between the University of British Columbia and those who were involved in the RCMP in organizing this meeting.
Finally, as former MP Marion Dewar said, in this, the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, pepper spraying protesters is no way for Canada to demonstrate leadership.
