Mr. Speaker, famed Holocaust survivor and scholar Elie Wiesel said:
We must [always] take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
I take these words to heart. As someone who has studied the Holocaust throughout my life, I understand the importance of the reality of man's inhumanity to man. It can sometimes be difficult here in Canada to understand the lengths to which human beings can go to advance their own self-interest.
We have our own issues of social justice in Canada, to be sure, but the realities of the Holocaust and the shock of the Holocaust, outside the lived experience, is for some just too much to bear. However, we must bear it. When we say “we must never forget” and make our solemn promise of “never again”, it means not only for the purposes of honouring those who were murdered by the Nazis but also to make sure this never happens again to anyone or any group.
This is one of those moments in history when we have not only an opportunity but an obligation to speak out and take action. People are dying and being persecuted, for no other reason than their faith, by an authoritarian regime that cares not. To not speak up leaves us in a moral vacuum, and history will not judge us well if we fail to act.
Let us look at the facts of what is actually taking place in China right now as we debate this motion.
There are about 12 million Uighurs, mostly Muslim, living in northwestern China in the region of Xinjiang. The Chinese government has reportedly arbitrarily detained more than a million Uighurs in detention camps. The existence of these camps has been confirmed by government documents, witness testimonies and satellite imagery. The majority of people in these camps have never been charged with crimes, have no due process and have no legal avenues to challenge their detentions. Often, their only crime in the eyes of the Communist Chinese regime is being Muslim.
It is only their closely held faith that may be sealing their fates. I say “may”, because we here in the House have a role to play.
The Chinese government has implemented measures against Uighurs, such as forcibly transferring children away from families, restricting the use of their national language, banning cultural activities, destroying schools and religious institutions and many other things we have heard about here today.
Since 2016, thousands of mosques, graveyards, and other religious sites have been desecrated and destroyed. The Uighur language has been banned in Xinjiang in schools. Practising Islam has been discouraged as a sign of extremism. Between 2017 and 2019, it is estimated that more than 80,000 Uighurs were transferred out of the far eastern Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region and forced to work in factories across China, some directly from detention camps. Researchers and rights groups say the labour transfer programs are part of the Chinese government's system of control, indoctrination and forced assimilation.
Both China and Canada have ratified the genocide convention, which defines the crime of genocide, establishes obligations of prevention and punishment, and recognizes the possibility of establishing state responsibility for a campaign of genocide. According to the genocide convention, genocide is a crime that can take place in times of war as well as in times of peace. The definition of genocide set out in the convention has been widely adopted at both national and international levels, including in the 1998 Rome statute of the International Criminal Court.
The crime of genocide is defined by the genocide convention with respect to three elements.
The first is that the victims form part of a protected group, i.e., a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, and in this case we have the Uighur Muslims as this group.
The second is that the perpetrators committed one or more enumerated acts against members of the group. These acts are the killing of members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, or forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. We have seen multiple instances of these acts in the case of Uighur Muslims in China.
Third, the perpetrators acted with the intent to destroy the protected group in whole or in part.
With respect to the third element of genocide, the intent in this case by the Chinese Communist regime could not be more clear: It wants to destroy the culture, faith and existence of the Uighur Muslims. Canada's Subcommittee on International Human Rights has already studied the facts and has concluded that the actions of the Chinese Communist Party constitute genocide. We know that the Uighurs are being systematically detained in camps, abused, sterilized and forced to become labourers on a mass scale.
The time has passed for debating semantics. The government must join our U.S. allies and the Biden administration in officially recognizing the Uighur genocide. It must encourage the recognition of a genocide by our allies around the world. It must work with these allies, including the U.S., to take coordinated action in response to this genocide, and it must impose Magnitsky sanctions against those responsible for these heinous crimes being committed against the Uighurs.
The Prime Minister can dodge questions about this as much as he wants, and that might work in the short term, but I implore him and Canada's government to do the right thing. History never fails to be the final arbiter of the performance of world leaders on the foremost human rights issues of the era in which they served. When it comes to the action or lack thereof taken by the Prime Minister, how does he want to be remembered?
In 1957, former prime minister Lester Pearson received the Nobel Peace Prize for his role is resolving Suez crisis through the United Nations. The selection committee argued that Pearson had saved the world, and he is considered one of the fathers of the modern concept of peacekeeping.
In 1988, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney stood virtually alone in the world against the tyranny of apartheid in South Africa and is revered to this day in South Africa.
In 1939, Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King and his government said, “None is too many” when it came to allowing the German transatlantic liner MS St. Louis to bring its passengers fleeing Europe onto Canadian soil, callously turning away that ship and sending over 900 Jewish souls back to the Nazis to be exterminated.
I ask the Prime Minister this: Does he want to be remembered like Pearson and Mulroney, as a champion, or like Mackenzie King, leaving himself to have to apologize for his lack of action when it comes to one of the true human rights abuses of our generation?
Any prime minister of this great country must have the courage and foresight to be among the first to condemn evil when they see it and have the determination to take steps that stop it from continuing. My colleague, the hon. member for Wellington—Halton Hills, eloquently said in the House that in Canada, our foreign policy begins with who we are. I therefore ask members this: Who are we?
I alluded to this before, but this is truly our time, as legislators and political leaders in a country that stands for freedom and human rights, to take action, to speak out and to stand up for what is right. Let us call out the Chinese Communist regime's heinous acts for what they truly are: a genocide.
I urge each and every member to do the right thing and support this motion. Let us vote yes for freedom, vote yes for human rights and vote yes for never again.
