44th Parl. 1st Sess.
March 27, 2023 11:00AM
Madam Speaker, I have two petitions to table today. Both deal with private members' bills that Conservative members have proposed.
The first is about a private member's bill I have put forward: Bill C-257. Petitioners want to see this legislation adopted. Bill C-257 seeks to combat political discrimination by adding political activity or belief as a prohibited grounds of discrimination in the Canadian Human Rights Act. This would align the federal Human Rights Act with most of Canada's provinces in this regard. Petitioners want to see the House support Bill C-257, which would ban discrimination on the basis of political belief or activity and would also defend the rights of Canadians to peacefully express their political opinions.
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Madam Speaker, the second petition is in support of my colleague from Northumberland—Peterborough South's Bill C-281, the international human rights act.
Petitioners note the importance of Canada's defending human rights and adjusting legislation to ensure the government is accountable to Parliament in the ongoing fight for justice and human rights. Petitioners call on the House to quickly adopt Bill C-281, the international human rights act.
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Madam Speaker, I do not doubt the member's sincere personal feelings, but I have to say that the government has failed the people of Afghanistan for far too long.
If we reflect on the timelines, the Taliban took Kabul in August 2021. The Afghanistan standing committee report that the member referred to came out in June 2022. It has been nine months since then, and now we are debating this legislation at the end of March 2023. The foreign affairs committee unanimously passed a motion I put forward in the fall of last year reiterating the call from the Afghanistan committee, and passed a similar motion this spring.
This legislation, once passed, does not grant the exemptions yet. We will still have to wait for exemptions to be granted by the government through regulation. We have already been through two winters in Afghanistan under the Taliban, and the very dire situations the member spoke about have persisted throughout that time. However, the government has been very late in responding to unanimous calls, and certainly calls from the opposition, for action. Why has it taken the government so long?
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Madam Speaker, on September 11, 2001, a terrorist organization that was using Afghanistan as its base of operations attacked New York and Washington. In response to this attack, Canada joined an American-like coalition that worked to overthrow Afghanistan's Taliban government and supported the transformation of Afghanistan into a free democracy. Canada also joined other countries in establishing tough new domestic anti-terrorism legislation that aided in preventing any kind of presence of or interaction with designated terrorist organizations.
The decision to overthrow Afghanistan's Taliban government was seen as just and a form of retaliation for the lives lost on September 11, but it was also framed as a war for the liberation of the Afghan people. It was widely explained not as a war against Afghanistan but as a war for Afghanistan, in particular for the freedom of the Afghan people.
The spirit of that period was one of profound optimism about the universality of the human aspiration for freedom and democracy and about the possibility of external intervention quickly bringing about that democracy. This optimism was best expressed by then British prime minister Tony Blair, who said:
...ours are not Western values, they are the universal values of the human spirit. And anywhere, any time ordinary people are given the chance to choose, the choice is the same: freedom, not tyranny; democracy, not dictatorship; the rule of law, not the rule of the secret police.
The implication in the minds of many seemed to be that we could use superior firepower to chase out the bad guys, introduce democracy and then quickly move on with our lives.
As Canada joined military efforts to support the transformation of Afghanistan into a free democracy, Afghanistan also became a major focus of Canadian development systems. In this whole enterprise we were motivated by the highest aspirations: to sacrifice blood and treasure to allow women and men on the other side of the world to seize their birthright of freedom. However, on August 15, 2021, almost exactly 20 years after the 9/11 attacks, as the last allied soldiers were pulling out of Afghanistan, it was again overrun by Taliban forces. As of this moment in time at least, our great optimistic efforts to transform Afghanistan ended in failure.
On the same day that Kabul fell, rather than being at his desk working on the desperately needed response to these unfolding events, our Prime Minister was visiting the Governor General to call a domestic election, an election that we did not need, that featured more polarization and demonization of Canadians than any in recent memory and that returned a virtually unchanged Parliament. We would have been so much better off if the Prime Minister had been putting his responsibilities ahead of his perceived political interests.
Leading up to the fall of Afghanistan, the Conservatives had been calling on the government to use special immigration measures to assist the most vulnerable Afghans, those who assisted Canada during the previous 20 years, as well as ethnic and religious minorities, such as Hazaras, Sikhs, Hindus and Christians. In fact, the very first statement I ever made in this House back in 2015 was to call for special immigration measures for Afghan minorities. The government's response to these calls has ranged from slow to non-existent, and lives have been lost as a result.
Outside of the failures of our government, it is worth taking stock of what happened in general between September 11, 2001, and August 15, 2021. What caused the optimism for the expansion of freedom and democracy that drove nation building in Afghanistan post-9/11 to fade into the fatalistic acceptance of the apparent global democratic decline that led the United States and other countries to leave Afghanistan and effectively hand it back to the Taliban?
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Madam Speaker, I will. It is my right to speak in the House. I appreciate that.
Transforming Afghanistan was a great and noble goal, but doing worthwhile things is never easy. Supporting the democratic development of Afghanistan was always going to be a long process, and if it was going to work, then it would require a long-term commitment.
Tony Blair is right, in an ultimate sense. The people always ultimately choose freedom over tyranny, but the short-term optimism of the post-9/11 era did not pay enough attention to the need to gradually and painstakingly develop the institutions and political culture of a free pluralistic society over time. We were too quick to want to declare mission accomplished. We cannot expect to simply chase out the bad guys and then roll out the template of free democratic institutions because there is no single template for such institutions.
The core problem was that so-called neo-conservatism was not, in practice, sufficiently conservative. Conservatism, in its essential form, emphasizes the importance of local culture, tradition and familial attachments. To succeed, the institutions and culture of free democracy must be built on that pre-existing local foundation.
There is no single template for democracy because democracy succeeds when it builds on pre-existing cultural structures that have existing legitimacy, which then confer that legitimacy on the emergent democratic structures. This is how democracy was successfully built in the west, especially in the Anglo-American tradition over a long period. If those advancing democracy elsewhere do not build on the existing cultural foundation, then there will inevitably be rival centres of power that compete for legitimacy with the new democrat institutions.
In practice, neo-conservatism was not sufficiently conservative because it did not sufficiently take stock of how deeply embedded traditions and authority structures need to be collaborated with and harnessed in order to build free institutions that are authentic to the local setting over time. Any work of external nation building requires both great patience and even greater humility.
Free societies are not built like buildings. Rather, they grow like trees. Our own long history of halting democratic development in the west building on pre-democratic foundations should have made it clear to us that democratic development was always going to be a long-term project if it was going to be completed.
In one sense, the work of securing democracy is never complete. As the saying goes, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Save for the possibilities of divine intervention or nuclear annihilation, there is no such thing as the end of history. That is as true in Afghanistan as it is anywhere else. The work of building Canadian democracy is not complete, so why should we have expected it to ever be complete in Afghanistan? Of course, the hope of many, and rightly so, was that at some point along the way, external troops would be able to fully withdraw and Afghans themselves would be the ones vigilantly guarding and defending their own freedom, no longer needing outside help.
The critics of continuing western involvements in Afghanistan believed we needed to end so-called forever wars at a certain point and to leave the country to its own work in this regard. This framing of forever wars was highly misleading.
American troops have been stationed in Korea for much, much longer than they have been in Afghanistan. Nobody considers that American presence in Korea a forever war. America's presence in Korea is rather a matter of a contingent of troops helping to guarantee the peace. The withdrawal of Americans from South Korea would create a significant heightened risk of catastrophic conflict, so it is good for America to keep a contingent of troops there as long as is necessary.
The nature of America's presence in Afghanistan was different of course than the nature of its presence in Korea, but the western presence in Afghanistan was still consistent with the gradual drawing down of engagement, more limited air support backing the Afghan army, extremely low casualty figures in the later years compared to the height of the conflict and a trajectory whereby a smaller and less costly presence could, over time, still help sustain local democracy and security.
The fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban was not the inevitable result of facts on the ground. It was the result of a political choice that reflected a change in the western mood, the shift from too optimistic, impatient interventionism without sufficient cultural understand to too pessimistic isolationist abandonment.
As we have seen, the politics of isolationism and withdrawal, of putting domestic issues over external security imperatives, has led to global democratic decline, greater insecurity and ultimately a higher risk of costly war. This is why, in an age of further threats to free democracies, we must be vigilant and active, embracing realistic optimism and strategic patience and making the investments and the sacrifices that are required to keep the world a safe place for freedom and democracy.
The quote I read earlier continues with the poignant line, “The spread of freedom is the best security for the free.”
I hear from time to time from constituents who want us to ignore events far away and instead to simply focus on challenges at home, but history teaches us that impulse to retrench from the world always leads to the decline of democracy and liberty and to threats from abroad washing up on our own shores. When this spirit prevails, the long-term costs to our own well-being and happiness are inevitably much higher than if we had been engaged with international events from the beginning. I hope we learn the lessons of that history and we apply it.
As it relates to Afghanistan, we must now turn our attention to that other legacy of 9/11, which is the impact of anti-terrorism legislation. Anti-terrorism legislation was designed to confront the threat posed by violent non-state actors. Certain states do engage in acts that would fit any coherent legal definition of terrorism, but we have generally found it useful to maintain the possibility of some intercourse with hostile or rights-abusing governments, even those that use terrorism. The extreme isolation associated with a terrorist listing was therefore designed for violent non-state actors as opposed to violent state actors. This design, though, has been stretched and complicated in certain respects in recent years.
First, certain organizations, such as the IRGC or the Wagner Group, may simultaneously function as an international terrorist organization and as part of, or a close affiliate of, a state. In our view, these organizations should still be listed as terrorist entities, but we should acknowledge that such designations move us closer in the direction of capturing state-affiliated entities, instead of just non-state actors, with anti-terrorism legislation. Designating the particular organs of terrorism, rather than the state itself, still provides space for some interaction with other state organs, and is therefore, in my view, quite doable, even without amending the Criminal Code as it exists.
More complicated is the case in which a terrorist organization comes to occupy and function as the de facto authority in the state, and this is now the case in Afghanistan. Removing such an organization from the terrorist list would clearly send the wrong message and weaken legitimate and important sanctions against that group. Withdrawing the designation from a terrorist group once it takes over government would appear to suggest that one way for a terrorist group to get off the terrorist list is to simply take over territory. Again, that would clearly send the wrong message.
However, the Criminal Code, as it currently exists, was not designed for the situation in which a terrorist group also functions as the de facto authority in a state, so it is reasonable to look for ways to make these provisions nimbler, if that nimbleness allows us to preserve the listing of terrorist groups as terrorist groups. Rather than removing the terrorist designation from a terrorist organization that is still a terrorist organization, we should be prepared to thoughtfully amend the Criminal Code to still allow some presence in, and engagement with the people of, a country when that country has been overrun by a terrorist organization without in any way legitimizing that organization.
This brings us to the particular provisions of Bill C-41. Bill C-41 would allow the Government of Canada to grant very limited exemptions to the Anti-Terrorism Act to allow the delivery of humanitarian assistance in areas controlled by terrorist organizations. The legislation does not name Afghanistan or the Taliban directly, but it is clearly designed to allow the government to grant narrow exemptions that would allow the delivery of emergency humanitarian relief into Afghanistan.
Afghanistan faces an ongoing humanitarian crisis, in large part as a result of Taliban misrule. Terrorists are generally not very good at running an economy, yet Canadian charities have not been able to deliver essential humanitarian aid because in the process of delivering that aid to the Afghan people, they may run afoul of the Anti-Terrorism Act and thus risk criminal prosecution.
In this particular case, we are not talking about the expenditure of public funds. We are talking simply about increasing the precision of Criminal Code provisions to give private Canadian charities the freedom to deliver private funds to the suffering people of Afghanistan. Bill C-41 does not prescribe the precise form of the exemptions the government will grant. It would simply give the government the power to grant these exemptions. It is reasonable for a government to have this power to deal with contingency situations, although the government will necessarily be held accountable for its judicious and effective use of this power.
On the basic objective of Bill C-41, the biggest problem I have is that it comes too late, not too late to be useful, but too late for many who have already been suffering under Taliban misrule for over a year and a half. Peer countries have been way ahead of us in addressing this problem, and Parliament has been pushing the government to address this issue for almost all of that time. In fact, immediately after the 2021 election, Conservatives proposed a motion to create a special committee on Afghanistan. When it reported to the House last spring, that committee recommended that changes be made to allow humanitarian assistance to get into Afghanistan. Following that, this past fall, the foreign affairs committee unanimously agreed to my motion calling for changes that would allow humanitarian assistance to get into Afghanistan, reiterating what was in the Afghan committee's report, and the committee adopted a second motion on the matter, proposed by the NDP earlier in the winter session, yet it has still taken until the end of March to actually begin debate on this bill.
When I met with international development stakeholders on the bill, they emphasized a significant concern about timelines, and in a few different senses. They highlighted the issue of timelines for the passage of the legislation in the hope the government will choose to prioritize it within its legislative agenda so the legislation can, indeed, move forward. The bill does need to be studied and debated thoroughly, but we are prepared to move it forward as quickly as possible, provided that sufficient time is set aside for study and debate.
While the principles are important, the bill is technically and legally complicated and does require meaningful examination, but stakeholders are not only concerned about the timeline for the passage of this bill. They are concerned about the timelines the bill would create for them in being able to get to work on the ground. Until this legislation passes, international organizations are potentially prohibited criminally from running humanitarian or development programs in Afghanistan if there is some risk of any portion of those resources eventually ending up in the hands of the Taliban.
This legislation would allow the Minister of Public Safety to grant certain narrow exemptions. From the perspective of these organizations, the legislation marks an improvement. However, the process associated with accessing these exemptions would be time-intensive and potentially highly bureaucratic, with no timeline set out. Again, it is not only about how long it takes to pass the bill, but also how long it would take organizations to be authorized to get to work.
The proposed process is that an exemption would be granted after a thorough review by the public safety minister, but only after the issue has been referred to that minister by another minister, either the immigration or foreign affairs minister, who would presumably have to conduct their own analysis. Exemptions would also have to be granted for each individual organization. If one development organization applies for and receives an exemption to operate a particular program, then another organization, running essentially an equivalent program in the same or different geographic area, would also have to apply for their own separate exemption.
There is also a great deal of uncertainty about how widely an exemption would apply. Would an organization that got an exemption to run a program in one province in one year have to apply for another exemption to extend the program, run the same program in a different province or run the program in another year? From my reading, there is a certain lack of clarity around the breadth of the exemptions that would be introduced.
Multiple organizations doing essentially the same work would each have to apply separately instead of simply being able to proceed with their work based on an exemption granted to someone else. This process seems more bureaucratic and costly than it needs to be, and it raises questions about whether the actual exemptions would be in place in a reasonable amount of time.
It also raises concerns about equity. Would the government subject certain organizations to more scrutiny than others, and would small and diaspora-led organizations be able to access these exemptions alongside larger organizations that have a longer history of working directly with the federal government?
Conservatives have repeatedly highlighted the need to ensure the inclusion of small and diaspora-led organizations in our thinking about international development. It is perhaps natural and inevitable that certain trusted partners are more likely to receive direct government funding, but it would be a grave problem if small and less-known organizations continued to face criminal prohibitions on delivering aid while larger, better-known players were given exemptions in identical situations.
It would seem reasonable for the government to establish certain general categories or situations of exemption, which would apply to all organizations, rather than only grant exemptions on an individual case-by-case basis. We will be digging more into this specific part of the issue at committee. Although we feel there is an urgency around the timeline of passing this legislation, there is also an urgency to ensure that processes are streamlined so that we can get assistance to the people who need it as soon as possible.
When I have been consulting with Canadians about this legislation, some have asked if aid should be flowing into Taliban-controlled Afghanistan at all. We know that the real cause of the suffering of the Afghan people is their Taliban oppressors. Poverty is, in this and so many other cases, the result of unjust and broken political institutions preventing people from moving forward in freedom and security. Why treat the symptom when the cause of the problem remains in place?
To that, I would say that what is true in Afghanistan is true in many places, to a lesser extent, and that is that poverty often has its roots in injustice. When people cannot borrow against their assets because they lack clear title, when a primary breadwinner faces arbitrary arrests and does not have secure access to an objective justice system, when transportation routes of goods are not secure, when corruption limits opportunities, when teenagers cannot go to school for fear of violence there or on the way, these are all too common instances in many parts of the developing world where violence causes or perpetuates poverty.
People everywhere have the ingenuity and the potential to lift themselves out of poverty if they are not held back by unjust systems that deprive them of the security, title and credit that they need to get ahead. The fight for justice and for the recognition of universal human dignity is central to development and poverty alleviation. We need to recognize this reality, but we also still need to attack poverty directly, especially in emergency situations like this.
It is not always possible to go directly to the roots of a problem. In the case of Afghanistan, by choosing to abandon Afghanistan's security and the building of just institutions, we have cut ourselves off from the ability to get at the roots of the problem, but with those bad decisions already baked in, we should still do all that we can to save lives and elevate the conditions of the Afghan people.
We should support such measures, even while recognizing that the Taliban cannot be permitted to continue to inflict its reign of terror on the Afghan people. The political problem will require an eventual solution. Delivering humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan is a necessary form of harm reduction, but we should not lose sight of the underlying injustices, political problems and of the need to look for solutions to them.
Based on this, what can we say about the future of Afghanistan? Nobody can say what surprises will rest around the corner, but the Afghan people deserve our continuing support and goodwill. Continuing contacts between Canadian organizations and Afghans in Afghanistan help all concerned to be informed and create opportunities to respond to emerging issues and dynamics.
We need to start by removing legal barriers that prevent humanitarian aid from getting in. Continuing access to food, education and other essentials will provide Afghans some space to move forward. The involvement of Canadian organizations in this effort will mean contact and two-way awareness that could turn into something else down the road.
We should retain some of the old optimism, because the intervening decades between 2001 and 2021 were not all for nothing. A new generation of Afghans has seen a different set of possibilities, and we will work together to ensure the re-emergence of those possibilities. We must still look for a way to be there for them.
At the end of the day, we know the choice that Afghans will make when they are able, because even if not with the right timelines and the right tactics, the main point was correct: “Ours are not Western values, they are the universal values of the human spirit. And anywhere, any time ordinary people are given the chance to choose, the choice is [always] the same: freedom, not tyranny; democracy, not dictatorship; the rule of law, not the rule of the secret police. The spread of freedom is the best security for the free.”
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Madam Speaker, we are less than an hour into debate on this important government bill on Afghanistan, debate that is, in my view, a year and a half too late. It shows the partisan political approach of the Liberals to immediately try to throw this important debate about Afghanistan over the side and shift to something else.
Beyond that, I would challenge the member to actually be aware of what is happening in the foreign affairs committee. The study that allegedly I have been filibustering has actually finished now. We have been through four hearings at the foreign affairs committee on that study, and I would invite the member to listen to some of the very thoughtful and insightful witnesses. We heard some witnesses from western NGOs. We also heard witnesses from throughout the developing world who shared their particular perspective on these issues.
I would welcome the member to actually come to the committee, as I have never seen her there before, to review the blues, listen to the witnesses and maybe be aware of what is actually happening at committee before she tries to divert an important debate on Afghanistan with something else.
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Madam Speaker, on much simpler matters such as passports and immigration applications, the government has massively expanded the delays we are seeing. When we already have families who are being privately sponsored for refugee status having to wait for three years and we hear the government saying it is going to approve exemptions in a reasonable amount of time, we do not have three years to wait, clearly, to get these exemptions moving forward.
By the sound of the question, my colleague from the Bloc has exactly the same concerns that I have, which are around timelines: how long it has taken us to get this far and how much longer it will take to not only pass the legislation, which is part of the process, but also get to a point where organizations are able to implement programs.
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Madam Speaker, again, we see the eagerness of Liberal and NDP politicians to shift the conversation to abortion.
I would just assure them again that there is a study happening at the foreign affairs committee. Four meetings have taken place. Neither of the members who have tried to divert this conversation from aid into Afghanistan to that issue have been at the foreign affairs committee. I participated actively in that study. My comments are on the record.
I would rather focus our discussion today on Bill C-41, which is the bill that is before the House. On this point, I agree with the member. This raises some questions about small organizations and whether small or medium-sized diaspora-led organizations would have an easy time accessing these exemptions. That is why I have raised this idea. What if we say that if one organization receives an exemption to operate under particular conditions in a particular place, then another organization that is doing more or less the same thing would be able to benefit from the same exemption?
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Madam Speaker, that is a great point from my colleague. I want to recognize him and thank him for his service.
It has been inspiring for me to see how veterans developed close connections with the Afghan people and have been so instrumental in trying to support the Afghan people through immigration measures as well as wanting to be part of the humanitarian response to the challenges they are facing.
The member is right that government can be so difficult to navigate and so complicated. That applies to individuals, to organizations and especially to smaller organizations that are trying to engage in these processes.
I would call on the government to do everything it can to minimize red tape, especially the red tape that organizations that are trying to engage the government have to experience. We want people to be able to get these exemptions done so that they can get programming out to those who need it.
It is not going to be good enough to pass this legislation and then have a parade. We need to actually get all the way through the process so that aid could be delivered to people on the ground by as many organizations as possible.
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Madam Speaker, there were a lot of different things in there.
The member sort of had an implied criticism that there is something going on about religious values in general. I want to identify the fact that many of the leading development organizations in Canada that are working hard to get assistance to the most vulnerable people around the world are coming from some kind of a faith-informed humanitarian motivation. These are Christian organizations like World Vision or Foodgrains Bank and Muslim organizations like Islamic Relief. For many people, though certainly not for all, a commitment to a sense of the image of God being in all of us is what leads to a passion for development assistance.
I want to recognize the role of people who come from a broad range of philosophical backgrounds who are involved in international development and the important work they are doing.
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Madam Speaker, I agree with many of the things the member has said about how the process this bill creates seems much more red tape-intensive than it needs to be. I look forward to seeing the amendments the NDP and others are going to propose.
I know there are sometimes limitations with respect to scope, so I have a specific question for the hon. member. Does she think the changes that we need to make to this bill are within the scope of the bill as it is currently written, or would we need a new piece of legislation to address the problems?
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Madam Speaker, my hon. friend and members of the government have, in their remarks, tried to argue why this legislation is better than the status quo. I do not think there is much debate in the House that there is a massive problem in Afghanistan and that we need to make amendments that make the Criminal Code more nimble, so that is not really where the debate is.
The debate is around the specific provisions, the construction of this legislation and the concern expressed by all three opposition parties that this legislation would pile so much red tape on development organizations that it would be very challenging for them to use them and they will face significant delays. What we have heard from many is that we need to be holding the government accountable concerning the timelines they would live with under this legislation to ensure that they can actually deliver assistance in a timely manner, that these exemptions are reasonable and accessible and that they are available to all organizations doing this work, not just organizations that have more experience accessing government.
I wonder, in response to my question, recognizing that there is agreement on the principle of this legislation, if the parliamentary secretary could explain why the government chose the particular approach that it did. Why it is different from what our allies have put in place? Why it is so relatively bureaucratic and intensive? Would the government consider the kinds of amendments that all three opposition parties have talked about?
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Madam Speaker, again, to the parliamentary secretary, we are not disputing the significance and importance of making changes in this regard. The issue is that it has been 18 months since the fall of Afghanistan, nine months since the Afghanistan committee made these recommendations and I think four or five months since the foreign affairs committee adopted a recommendation that mirrored those by the special committee on Afghanistan. Now we have a proposal that is potentially unwieldy.
We need to study at committee how to make it work better and to make it work more effectively. I am hearing from stakeholders that it is better than nothing. However, we need to figure out how to make sure that not only the timelines for passing this legislation will be addressed but also the timelines that charitable organizations will be needing to get support to the ground.
I wonder if the member could share a bit about what amendments the government would be willing to support, especially when it comes to ensuring that all organizations will be able to access these exemptions on reasonable terms, in a reasonable time frame and that especially small diaspora-led organizations will be able to access this process in a reasonable way so that we are able to get aid to the ground in Afghanistan as quickly as possible.
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Madam Speaker, I think it is noteworthy that, regardless of how unexpected or expected events may have been, all of our allies have moved much more quickly than we have to introduce these exemptions. I want to ask the parliamentary secretary as well for her response to the Auditor General's report today. It shows that the government is failing to measure results when it comes to its so-called feminist international assistance policy. Twenty-four out of 26 policy indicators do not actually measure results. The government talks a lot about this, but it is not measuring its impact on the ground.
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