44th Parl. 1st Sess.
December 7, 2021 10:00AM
- Dec/7/21 4:56:07 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound, who is someone I am honoured to serve with. As a veteran, he has done numerous missions and tours in Afghanistan and I am looking forward to his comments later. I know that sometimes he can be a little “rough” around the edges, but we are looking forward to his comments.
I am glad to be able to speak to the motion we brought forward on this day of supply, which is asking to set up a special committee to look into the crisis in Afghanistan and get our friends, allies and citizens out of Afghanistan after it fell to the Taliban; to find out what lessons we can learn so we do not make these mistakes again; and to find out why this was not made a higher priority by the government.
It should not have been a surprise to the Prime Minister or anyone in cabinet. We know that on May 2, 2019, CSIS presented a report that said that if the United States decided to withdraw from Afghanistan, the Taliban would recapture the entire country, including the city of Kabul, in very short order. That report was in 2019. Then, of course, Donald Trump, when he was still president of the United States, announced on February 29, 2020 that he was officially withdrawing and winding down U.S. operations in Afghanistan. Of course, the coalition that Canada had been a part of in Afghanistan would not be able to be sustained without the U.S. in theatre.
The question becomes this: If CSIS warned, based upon sound intelligence, that Afghanistan would be quickly captured by the Taliban, and Donald Trump announced the withdrawal in February 2020, why did the government not act? Instead of planning for the withdrawal and making sure we got our interpreters out before the country started to fall under the control of the brutal Taliban and the harsh conditions that exist there today, we could have been moving people out. Instead, the Prime Minister planned for a selfish and unnecessary, $650-million election. That is despicable.
Many of us on this side of the House and even members on the other side were getting contacted by veterans of the Canadian Armed Forces. They were pleading with all of us to get their friends who were over there out. These were people they served alongside, who supported them as interpreters and drivers and made sure their base camps and forward-operating locations were safe and secure. They served together. They were a team. We lost 158 Canadian soldiers, and over 40,000 served. Our Canadian veterans who served developed great relationships and considered their allies to be brothers and sisters in arms. To then see the government turn its back on these allies was so disheartening.
The true heroes throughout all of this have been those veterans. I would like to mention guys like Corey Shelson, Tim and Jamie Laidler, General David Fraser and General Denis Thompson, among others who have really done yeoman's service in organizing and getting people out of Afghanistan. In particular, because I and my office have been working closely with him, I want to highlight Robin Rickards from Thunder Bay.
Robin has had multiple tours in Afghanistan. He started contacting me over six years ago regarding getting these interpreters out of the country. Under the previous Conservative government, we had a special immigration program for Afghanistan interpreters. It got filled up; people quit applying and it wound down. We were able to get a few more out after that, as the Leader of the Opposition mentioned this morning in his speech. However, the reality is that people like Corey just would not quit, and they forewarned the government and us as members of Parliament. I know the member for Thunder Bay—Rainy River worked incredibly closely with Robin as well.
Every time any of us contacted cabinet, whether it was the minister of defence, the minister of immigration, the minister of foreign affairs or the Prime Minister himself, it seemed to fall on deaf ears. Nothing seemed to happen until the fall of Kabul in the middle of a federal election.
These veterans, through the Veterans Transition Network and many other NGOs, raised money to fund the safe houses. Generous donations came in from veterans, current serving members and Canadians at large. They chartered flights, bought airline tickets and continued to build both the air bridge and the land bridge to safe havens for those who were left behind. Of course, because they were relying on generosity and because things started to heat up so desperately, the money for those safe houses started to run out. On behalf of those veterans, a number of us asked in this House and in writing if the Government of Canada would give the organizations $5 million, so that we could keep the safe houses open and keep those interpreters and their families, the hundreds of people who were in the safe houses, safe in Kabul. The government callously said no. Five million dollars is a drop in the bucket around this place, and it would have gone a long way to protecting Afghan interpreters who were waiting to be processed as applicants to come to Canada.
The people in the Veterans Transition Network really did a lot of heavy lifting. They were part of the group that identified and made sure that the people making claims to come to Canada as refugees had served with our forces and had all their documents in order. They were reaching out to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada to get all the applications processed, but unfortunately all of that kind of went up in smoke when the fall of Kabul happened. We saw the complete chaos that occurred at the Kabul airport.
Since that time in the middle of August, when we saw the chaos and craziness that happened, our allies, like Germany and the United States, have continued to move out the refugees and citizens at risk, as well as interpreters and support staff to their armed forces, without any problem. They have been chartering flights in and out of Kabul non-stop. That is why the United States is already sitting on something like over 40,000 refugees in the mainland.
However, we are not seeing that happen here. Why is the Government of Canada not chartering those flights or at least making sure there are tickets on commercial aircraft for all those applicants who are sitting there waiting in Kabul or Kandahar to get out?
The Liberals talk a good game. We see the minister of immigration almost throw his shoulder out every question period here, patting himself on the back for getting 4,000 Afghan refugees out so far. The Canadian Armed Forces identified over 23,600, yet IRCC has processed only 14,675 and there are only 4,000 here so far. That means there are 9,600 Afghan refugees, interpreters, LGBTQ community members, and ethnic and religious minorities like the Hindi, the Sikh and the Hazaras, all sitting there waiting to be processed. They made the applications, yet red tape seems to be holding them back.
I have to thank my staff. They have been dealing directly with Afghan refugees, with our interpreters and our friends and allies, including Canadian citizens who are still trapped in Afghanistan. Some of them had to leave Kabul when the safe houses closed. They went back to their homes only to find that they had either been burnt down or were being lived in by the Taliban themselves. There were actually notices issued to arrest them. I know some went back, saying, “If I turn myself in, maybe they won't kill my family and they'll execute only me.”
We have so many stories of people who served with our forces, who served as journalists and who have been left behind and given up on Canada. That is not the Canada we are supposed to be. We are supposed to be the Canada that, because of the great work of our men and women in uniform who go out there and right the evils in the world, stands up for those who cannot stand up for themselves. Those people sacrificed blood and treasure in serving Canada. Let us support our veterans and let us bring home those Afghan allies who served with us.
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- Dec/7/21 5:07:40 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, why would we want to split this work up over three committees, when those three committees can be doing other work? We should be having a special committee, as we have done in the past, such as in the previous Parliament, on Canada-China relations. There have been other committees in the past, like the special committee on the war in Afghanistan, which operated through Parliament the entire time and was outside the Standing Committee on National Defence.
This would be a short-term committee to look at how the government failed and how we can correct it so we can get better in the future. If the member does not want to learn from the mistakes his government has made, I can see that. He has always been in here as an apologist, trying to orchestrate the cover-ups that are so important to the front benches.
If the member is sincere about saving lives, let us get this committee to work. Let us find out what is happening and make sure we can come up with ideas on how to go forward.
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- Dec/7/21 5:10:05 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the member from the NDP seems to forget that our Afghan interpreter refugee program was fully subscribed. People used it, and at the end it was just a trickle that was coming in. People who came here were proud to be coming to Canada. They became citizens and they sponsored their families to get to Canada as well.
I am very proud of that program. I am proud of our forces and the job they did in fighting for women, girls and those who could not stand up for themselves in Afghanistan, in liberating villages and in fighting the tough fights in and around Kandahar. We need to be there with those veterans now as they are trying to get their friends and family out.
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- Dec/7/21 5:11:07 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I could go on forever.
If there had been leadership from the Liberals, the minister of defence, the minister of citizenship and immigration and refugees, the minister of foreign affairs and especially the Prime Minister himself, we would not be in this situation today. If we had not had that unnecessary and expensive election that was all about the Prime Minister's hubris, we would have had boots on the ground sooner, equipment in the airfield and people moved to safety.
There were so many controls put on the special forces in Kabul trying to get Afghan refugees out that they were not outside the wire. The government would not let them outside the wire. The Ukrainian special forces went and got a bunch of Canada-bound refugees and took them to Ukraine.
That is leadership.
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- Dec/7/21 5:48:18 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, we concur and accept the amendment.
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- Dec/7/21 6:15:49 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, we request a recorded division.
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- Dec/7/21 8:24:12 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I will be directing all my questions to the Minister of Foreign Affairs.
In 2018, Parliament unanimously passed a bill that I brought forward on Magnitsky sanctions, holding gross human rights violators who are foreign officials to account. Unfortunately, the government has not used it since 2018. Last week, the parliament the European Union actually did a report and scolded the Government of Canada for failing to hold corrupt foreign officials to account.
When will the Minister of Foreign Affairs finally use the Magnitsky act to sanction those gross human rights violators?
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- Dec/7/21 8:25:41 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Minister of Foreign Affairs was a member of Parliament back in 2018 when she voted in favour of the Magnitsky sanctions. It was good enough to pass then, but was she just virtue signalling to the diaspora communities here in Canada and in countries such as Ukraine, Belarus, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and to the people who we are standing up for human rights and democracy around the world? Was she just virtue-signalling to them at that point in time? Why is the minister not using Magnitsky sanctions against all those people who are abusing human rights around the world?
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- Dec/7/21 8:26:53 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after the Minister of Foreign Affairs was appointed, I sent a letter asking her to review all the correspondence and names that were submitted by my colleagues and me about human rights abusers, including those who harvest organs from Falun Gong practitioners in China, those responsible in Iran for the downing of Ukraine International Airlines flight PS752, and those responsible for the human rights abuses we see from the regime in Tehran.
We also want to make sure that we are holding to account those who have been violating the human rights of innocent protesters who have been arrested as political prisoners in Hong Kong, and of the journalists and political prisoners who are being held right now in detention in Belarus. Why would she not use the Sergei Magnitsky Law to send a signal, in concert with the European Union, the United Kingdom and the United States?
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- Dec/7/21 8:28:35 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, one request from the families of the Iranian and Ukrainian communities that lost loved ones in the downing of flight PS752 is that we list the Quds Force and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organizations. Why has the minister not listed IRGC as a terrorist organization?
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- Dec/7/21 8:29:29 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, we all know that Russia is amassing about 175,000 troops on the borders of Ukraine. President Biden had calls and discussions yesterday with President Putin, France, Germany, Italy and Great Britain. Why did he not call Canada?
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- Dec/7/21 8:30:09 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the minister knows that we have been able to extend Operation Unifier, which was started by our previous Conservative government. We have 200 troops on the ground there who have been in training missions.
What else will the minister and the government do to ensure that Ukraine gets the support it needs to push back on a potential Russian invasion?
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- Dec/7/21 8:31:04 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it was reported that the Government of Canada was considering putting in more troops and moving frigates into the Black Sea, as well as moving our CF-18 fighter jets from Romania into Ukraine.
Will the minister put military equipment and troops into the situation in Ukraine? Will they provide Ukraine with lethal military weapons?
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