- Member of Parliament
- Member of the Joint Interparliamentary Council
Whip of the New Democratic Party
Member of the panel of chairs for the legislative committees
- NDP
- Edmonton Strathcona
- Alberta
- Voting Attendance: 67%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $141,604.97
- Government Page
- Feb/7/24 2:19:06 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, more than 660 million women and girls are living in conflict zones, which is a 50% increase in the last six years. In Ukraine, two-thirds of those who are internally displaced are women. In Sudan, women make up 69% of those displaced, and 90% of the people crossing into Chad are women and girls. In Afghanistan, a United Nations expert said that 20 years of progress for women's and girls' rights have been erased since the Taliban took over, and in Palestine, 70% of the victims in Gaza are women and children. Heartbreakingly, two mothers are being killed per hour in Gaza right now.
Canadian organizations can alleviate this suffering and promote human rights, yet every year, Canada's investment is a fraction of what we have promised. For budget 2024, the government must listen to experts, to those 100 organizations that wrote to it, and do what is best to stand up for those around the world who need our support.
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- Dec/11/23 5:12:25 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, yes, it is pretty baffling that Conservatives would have voted against international development and foreign affairs. They voted against the support for gender equity work that was being proposed. All of these things are a clear indication to me that this is simply an attempt to weaponize debate in the House. As a tool to do that, they are using the pain and suffering of women and girls in Afghanistan. It is absolutely appalling.
I hope anyone watching recognizes that this is not about helping people in Afghanistan, but about preventing the Government of Canada and Parliament from getting supports to Canadians. The reason for that is the Conservative Party is more interested in power than it is in getting supports for Canadians.
Today, the NDP got dental care for Canadians, and I am so utterly proud. The Conservatives cannot tell me one single thing that they have gotten for Canadians.
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Madam Speaker, it is always a pleasure to stand in this place and represent the good people of Edmonton Strathcona.
This is a concurrence debate. We were unaware that this was coming, and so I am going to talk a little bit from the heart and tell members a few of the things that I have been thinking about, now knowing that we are to debate this motion.
As we all know in this place, in 2021, Kabul fell and the Taliban took over Afghanistan. I do not think that any one of us can really understand the horrific consequences that had on women and girls in Afghanistan and what that shift, that change, means to women and girls in Afghanistan who had been given hope for so many years, because there was the possibility for them to go to school, and for them to be teachers, doctors, lawyers or members of Parliament. The women were able to participate in their culture and their country, but in 2021, that was all taken away from them.
I have been working with members across the floor. The member for Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound mentioned earlier that we have a cross-party group that is trying desperately to help some of those women MPs get to safety. It is unbearable how slow it is. One of the worst days I have had as a parliamentarian was waking up and finding out that one of those members of Parliament had been murdered. I know that the member for Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound feels the same as me. I know that all of us in this place are absolutely horrified that these people have not been able to be brought to safety, and so we are continuing to work with civil society, and we are continuing to work across aisles to make sure that we can bring these women to safety.
I also want to tell a bit of a positive story as well, because we often talk about women and girls in Afghanistan and the burden, trauma and absolute horror that they are facing. It has literally been described as one of the worst places on earth to be female. When I am in my riding I like to talk to classes. I think talking to students about democracy and how to be involved in democracy is very important. I think it is a big part of my job. I was a teacher before I was a politician. I was talking to a grade 6 class about how devastating it is that education had been taken away from women and girls in Afghanistan, and a little girl in the front row put up her hand and told me that she was from Afghanistan. She had gotten out of Afghanistan and come to Canada. She was in the front row, and she was studying. She was in school, and she was learning. It is stuff like this that makes me think that we have to fight so much harder.
I have a dear driver, a lovely guy, and his daughter is from Afghanistan. She came to the House last week and spent some time with us here. She sat and watched question period. I hope we were all behaving, although I must say I doubt it. However, it is a pretty important thing to know that there are girls and women from Afghanistan who are getting that education. It means a lot to me.
I do think that it is important that this place be seized with what we can do to help women and girls in Afghanistan. I do think that it is important that we talk about foreign issues and that we talk about humanitarian support. Canada is not playing the meaningful role it needs to play. We have not lived up to our obligations. We have not lived up to our reputation. We have not lived up to what we should do. Our ODA is extraordinarily low.
We are really good at saying things like “We have a feminist international assistance policy”, but we are not very good at actually implementing it. This government loves to tap its chest and say that it is a feminist government. In fact, government members keep telling us that there is a feminist foreign policy, although nobody has ever seen it.
The fact of the matter is, if we are going to be a country with a feminist international assistance policy, which I fully support and in fact I helped write the policy before I was elected, then we need to stand up for women and girls, and that does not just mean in concurrence debates. It does not just mean that when the MP for Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan decides he wants to mess with what is going on in the House he can call a concurrence debate and cry crocodile tears for Afghan women and girls.
He did not vote last week to support international development spending; he voted three times to not support international development spending. The Conservative members voted three times to not provide support for women and girls around the world. Folks have been talking to us today about the reproductive rights of women and girls. We know that, under Stephen Harper, the Conservatives cut that completely out of international development funding. I can tell the House something right now: When support for abortion is cut, it does not stop abortion; it stops safe abortion, and people die.
When I asked to do a study on women's rights in the international human rights subcommittee, the Conservative member from Peace River who sits on the committee said he was not interested in doing a study on the rights of women but would be more than happy to do a study on the rights of the preborn, not women who have been born, not women who are in our world who are struggling, but the preborn.
We all know what this is about; it is about the Conservatives' trying to change the channel from their appalling voting record. It is all about the fact that they are trying to change the channel from the fact that they voted against the Canada-Ukraine free trade agreement, voted against Operation Unifier and voted against support for Ukraine. My goodness, Conservatives voted against the human rights museum. Honestly, who does that?
I was at home this weekend. It was my son's 16th birthday, and I would like to have the indulgence of the House to wish my son a very happy 16th birthday. I was sitting with my family, and members may be surprised to learn that my family is very non-political. None of them can really understand why they have a member of Parliament in the family. We are not one of those families. They all asked me about the nonsense in the House. They wanted to know what that nonsense was, when members had to sit here for 30 hours. I told them they would not believe it, but it cost $2 million for the Conservatives to do the little fundraising kerfuffle that they thought was so important. They asked me whether the Conservatives thought it was a good use of time and whether they thought it was what Canadians want from their politicians. Today is a great day for me, because New Democrats got dental care for Canadians. The Conservatives got a concurrence debate on an issue that their voting record shows they do not even care about. There is where we are at, folks.
Let us talk a little about some of the issues with regard to Afghanistan. I can talk about international development, foreign affairs and international humanitarian law all day, and I am happy to do it. At the initial time when we heard we were doing a concurrence debate, it was going to be about Bill C-41, or the aid to Afghanistan bill. Of course, the Conservatives must have made a mistake, because they do not actually care what they are bringing forward to the House. They are just trying to come up with something they could throw up as a shield. They got the wrong bill and the wrong concurrence motion. Then we had to sort of change direction a little. However, since they had initially wanted us to talk about Bill C-41, I am game. I am keen to talk about Bill C-41, which the the NDP could not support. We were the only party in the House that did not vote for the bill, because it was such a flawed piece of legislation.
Let me explain a little. International humanitarian law exists in the world, and it is very clear that organizations working on international humanitarian efforts have certain protections so they can do that work. These are the people we ask to go into the world, into the most dangerous, most heartbreaking situations that we have on the globe. They do that so they can bring food, shelter and life-saving humanitarian aid. There are international humanitarian law standards in place. Instead of using those standards the way that Australia, Europe, the U.S. and all sorts of countries did, the Liberal government found a weird convoluted route whereby it was kind of like one had to opt out. One is a terrorist until one opts out; this is basically how it works. One has to get a special pass to give humanitarian assistance.
We were able to get some carve-outs through the legislation. We were able to get some of that to work, but I sat in the committee meetings and can tell members that the people who wrote the legislation, and the members of those committees, do not understand how international development works. It does not happen in a sterile environment. It does not start on day one and end on day 12. It is not as definable as that.
The legislation that was put in place is very problematic. In fact, an article that came out on the CBC says that aid groups still say that Ottawa is hampering work in Afghanistan. We started asking for the legislation in 2021. It took years for flawed legislation to come forward. I do not know how many times I stood in the House and asked questions about it. The legislation is still not working; it is still not acting properly. Organizations are still not able to deliver the aid. Realistically, if the Conservatives actually cared about the people of Afghanistan and about getting support to Afghans, they would be more concerned about making sure that the legislation is fixed. World Vision's policy director Martin Fischer says that he is “frustrated and bewildered” that the process is taking so long. He says, “It's hard to understand why the machinery of government is having a hard time putting in place what should be a pretty straightforward...process.” The legislation is still not working. The aid is still not getting to Afghanistan.
As I mentioned it earlier, the Liberals, who have the lowest ODA, or official development assistance, that we have ever had in this country and who are abdicating their responsibility under a feminist foreign policy and a feminist international assistance policy, have brought forward legislation that is overly bureaucratic, is overly problematic and does not work. On the other side, we have the Conservatives, who, frankly, if one were to listen to them, probably do not like women very much.
This is where we are at with that. When I talk about—
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Madam Speaker, it is always interesting to listen to my colleague and hear his thoughts. We are in this place right now having this debate. We were not told that this was coming. This has been a bit of a surprise for us. We are trying to think of ways that we could help the people of Afghanistan. I do not think there is a single person in this place who does not think that we should do everything we possibly can, particularly for the women and girls of Afghanistan.
I have to say, though, that I have the list here of the votes that we had over the 30-some hours that we stayed in the House voting because the Conservative Party thought that was a useful thing to do. While they are here telling us that it is vitally important that we support Afghanistan, three times for millions of dollars they voted against supporting international development and foreign affairs efforts. On one hand they are taking away the money that people in Afghanistan need. In Afghanistan right now, we have people who are severely food insecure, who need help, yet we have the Liberals with Bill C-41 making it very difficult to deliver that aid, and we have the Conservatives literally voting to stop it. In fact, they ran in the last election on cutting foreign aid by 25%. How do—
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Mr. Speaker, this comment goes back to what I was saying before. As much as I think all of us in this place want to get aid to the people of Afghanistan as fast as possible, and I honestly believe that all of us in this place want that, the difficulty of being a lawmaker is that we have to look at the long-term implications of the laws we put forward. What happens if this means there are women and girls in other countries who do not get the support they need because we put legislation in place and because another government chooses to weaponize it? It is a real concern.
I appreciate the work the member has done in Afghanistan. I want to give a huge shout-out to an organization, Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan, which continues to do everything it can to help women and girls in Afghanistan at a time of great personal risk. One thing we should all continue to think about as we think about Bill C-41 is that the organizations that represent Canada around the world, the CSOs and NGOs, the organizations doing this important work, are heroes. They really do need to be acknowledged in this place.
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- Jun/9/23 1:15:46 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, this is the difficult challenge that we found this sector in. This is in fact exactly where we are at, with millions of people who are dying and millions of people who are at risk. There are also principles of humanitarian development and humanitarian aid that are core principles under which we need to do this work and this bill pits those two things against each other. That is the problem. This bill actually is offering, like I said, crumbs to the sector in saying they are not going to get what they want or what they need, the people of Afghanistan are not going to get what they want or what they need, but here is something. They either have to take this or they have to wait another two years for anything, if anything ever comes forward.
It is not really a fair choice to give to the sector. It is not really a fair choice to give to any of us in this place to give us such flawed legislation, knowing that people's lives are on the line and we either have to choose to support a terrible bill being brought forward by the government or let people die. It is an impossible choice and the implications are that down the road this could have impacts on other populations. This could mean other people could die because of the criminalization of development.
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Madam Speaker, I have to say I was a bit nervous there for a minute after the Conservatives made it so I was unable to give my remarks last week. I was worried that was going to happen again. I am quite happy they are just cold at the moment.
As always, it is my great delight to stand in this House and represent the people of Edmonton Strathcona. Today, we are talking about something that is very close to my heart and something that I have been working on for most of my career. While I am delighted to stand representing the people of Edmonton Strathcona, I am not delighted to be having this conversation at this moment in time.
In February 2021, six months before the fall of Kabul, I wrote to Mr. Garneau, the Minister of Foreign Affairs at the time, and I explained to him what was going to happen in August of 2021 if the Canadian government did not take action. I raised that again during question period in May 2021 and spoke about how people in Afghanistan needed Canada to stand up.
We all know what happened in August 2021. We all know how we failed the people of Afghanistan in August 2021. We know the reasons for it. I am not going to get into that here. We failed them on immigration. We failed them on humanitarian aid. We failed the people of Afghanistan in so many different ways.
Today, we are talking about a bill that is supposed to fix that failure. Today, we are talking about Bill C-41, which is a humanitarian carve-out. Let me correct that; it is supposed to be a humanitarian carve-out for humanitarian organizations.
We are in this place right now debating a bill that took 18 months to come to fruition, while so many Afghans suffered and starved. The government took 18 months. What we have right now is not even what the humanitarian sector asked for. It is not even what we have been calling for the past 18 months.
I stood in this House and asked for a humanitarian carve-out for humanitarian organizations so that Canadians who wanted to help in Afghanistan could do that and so that Canadians who have decades of experience working with the people in Afghanistan could do that.
I raised that in the House on November 30, 2021. I asked if the minister, at the time, was going to act with the urgency required to make sure there was a humanitarian carve-out in place so that Canadian organizations could work in Afghanistan and could help people in Afghanistan who were suffering so much under the current regime.
Instead, what we have now is a bill that will limit the abilities of humanitarian organizations. Let us make this very clear: This is not just about Afghanistan. This is about all humanitarian contexts. What we decide with this legislation will have impacts in Gaza and Yemen, and it will have impacts in all kinds of humanitarian contexts. While we are looking at it within the scope of Afghanistan right now, it is not just about Afghanistan and every single person needs to understand that.
I was speaking to experts. I am sure many of us spoke to experts within the humanitarian sector. MSF recently put in a published response to Bill C-41. It said:
Criminalizing Canadian humanitarian agencies or their staff for working in territories controlled by terrorist groups would be contrary to existing international norms and laws, most notably the Geneva Conventions, and might even be unconstitutional. There is legal precedent in Canada supporting the claim that, owing to the life-saving purpose of humanitarian aid, it cannot be considered criminal to provide it, even when a terrorist group may accrue some benefit from that aid.
MSF works in some of the most horrendous circumstances in this world. It is saying that this legislation does not meet the needs that needs to be met. I have heard some interesting things.
I have spoken to the Minister of Public Safety, the Minister of Justice and the Minister of International Development. I have spoken to all these ministers and asked, “Who is responsible, and when is it coming?” I have also listened to all three ministers tell me that it is someone else's problem, that it is someone else's fault and not to worry, that someone else is dealing with it or that it is too complex for them to undertake.
I want to tell members what some of the other countries have done. The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade announced that:
Australia [would implement] the [UN Security Council's humanitarian] exemption immediately relying [upon] the Charter of the United Nations Act 1945. Accordingly, assistance or activities covered by [the Security Council's exemption]...do not constitute an offence under Australian sanctions laws.
The United Kingdom amended its regulations to indicate that its financing prohibition does not cover the delivery of humanitarian assistance or other activities that support basic human needs in Afghanistan. There is also the U.S. and the European Union. They all amended their legislation. In fact, with respect to the United Nations, on December 22, 2021, the UN Security Council decided through resolution 2615, the drafting of which was spearheaded by the United States, “that humanitarian assistance and other activities that support basic human needs in Afghanistan” do not violate the council's sanctions regime.
The council also specified:
[T]hat the processing and payment of funds, other financial assets or economic resources, and the provision of goods and services necessary to ensure the timely delivery of such assistance or to support such activities are permitted.
That happened on December 22, 2021. Therefore, countries around the world that are our allies who also believe in the rule of law, humanitarian assistance and humanitarian law were able to make this humanitarian carve-out. However, Canada took 18 months and has not provided a carve-out. Let us be very clear: This law is not a humanitarian carve-out. Why is this so important and pressing? Why have I brought this up in the House and written to the ministers time and time again? Why has every party in the House raised this issue?
My colleague from the Bloc just brought up recently how long he has been calling for this. The Special Committee on Afghanistan was calling for this. Why have we all been acting for this? It is because a record number of people in Afghanistan need our help.
Hunger does not wait. It is not waiting for us to have time or for it to be convenient for the rest of us. People are starving to death in Afghanistan. I have to say, Canada has spent billions of dollars, and we have lost the lives of Canadian soldiers on Afghanistan soil. We have a relationship with Afghanistan. We have an obligation to the people of Afghanistan.
They do not need our support when things are going well. The people of Afghanistan do not need us to step up when all is well. However, when six million people are at risk of severe malnourishment, tens of millions of people are food-insecure and cannot have enough food to eat, the economy has failed, there are drought conditions and climate change has made it impossible for the people of Afghanistan to feed themselves is when they need Canada to step up. That is when we need to do the work to help the people of Afghanistan.
Do not get me wrong, Madam Speaker: The Taliban is a horrendous terrorist organization by all definitions. What the members of the Taliban are doing to women and girls in that country right now is so repugnant and disgusting to me. However, we cannot stop helping people because of that. We still have to help people who are there. I would like to have every single schoolgirl be able to come to this country because if they cannot learn in their country, I would like Canada to do everything it can. I would like to say that an unlimited number of Afghans should be able to come here and study.
I know that I am very angry right now, but I will say one thing. I give speeches in my community all the time. I go and talk to students. It is a really important part of our role as parliamentarians to be in our communities.
I was talking to a grade 6 class about the importance of being a parliamentarian and my role as the foreign affairs critic. I talked about how one of the worst things for me was knowing that women and girls could not go to school in Afghanistan. Teaching women and girls fundamentally changes a country; it is the best thing we can do to deal with climate change, to teach women and girls all these reasons.
This beautiful girl in the front row put up her hand and told me that she was a refugee from Afghanistan, and she was in Canada studying and learning. It was such an incredible and beautiful thing to see.
I will come back to Bill C-41. One of the things that I think is very interesting about this is the way our humanitarian assistance has developed in this country. We have an Official Development Assistance Accountability Act in law. There is a law in our country, put in place in 2008. I was thrilled to be part of the civil society groups that were pressing for some of the legislation back then.
We have a law in place, and it says that Canada's humanitarian and development assistance would go to those most in need and that we would support those most in need. Not only is it law; it is Canadian values. My goodness, every Canadian wants to support people who are most in need and who most require our support. How can there be a better case for providing humanitarian support? How could that be possible?
Over the past eight months, close to 10,000 Canadians have joined the Aid for Afghanistan campaign, calling on the federal government to remove barriers to life-saving aid and assistance in Afghanistan. It is absolutely clear that Canadians support providing this humanitarian assistance. This is what they have been asking for.
The restrictions that Canada has in place have prevented Canadian organizations from doing that, from getting life-saving assistance to the most vulnerable and actually living up to our obligations under international law.
This is a country that has a feminist international assistance policy and is supposed to have a feminist foreign policy. From what I have been told, we have one; it is just not written down. I do not know if the government knows how policies work. This a country that is supposed to be a feminist leader and that is supposed to be leading the world, but we know that the impacts are disproportionately felt by women and girls. The impacts of the poverty in Afghanistan are being felt by women and girls. The human rights abuses that are happening in Afghanistan are disproportionately happening to women and girls.
All the rhetoric that we use with regard to humanitarian assistance impacts women and girls more, and yet this carve-out does not help us. I am going to say why it does not help us. First, and I have mentioned this already, it is a registry. It is not a humanitarian carve-out. It is not a carve-out in the same way that the UN, the U.S., Australia, the EU or the U.K had carve-outs. It is not that.
It was also developed despite the expertise in our country. The government did not liaise with, listen to or hear the sector. The sector was clear on what they needed. The experts in humanitarian aid, those who are experts at what they do, told the government what was needed and what they needed to see.
That is not what this legislation is. For the life of me I do not understand why the government would not want to listen to the experts in the field, who know what they are talking about.
Another thing that is wrong with this is that because of the way it is drafted, it puts humanitarian organizations at risk. It does that by actually interfering with their ability to be neutral and to be seen as humanitarian.
I was quite concerned when the current Minister of International Development was appointed. Humanitarian and development organizations spend all their time making sure that they are not associated with the military or defence, that they have neutrality and the ability to do their work on the ground. This bill would limit that. That is why neither the International Committee of the Red Cross nor MSF supports this bill.
We do not know what the bill would look like in other contexts. Right now, the bill has been developed because of what we are seeing in the Afghanistan situation. However, as I raised earlier, it does not talk about what happens if we are talking about other terrorist groups or listed entities. What would the bill mean in northern Nigeria? Can we not provide humanitarian aid there? What about Yemen and Burkina Faso? All these countries have similar challenges, and the legislation would apply to those groups as well. However, we have not heard from the government how it intends to deal with that.
We do not know if the bill is just for Canadian citizens working for Canadian organizations. What about a Canadian citizen working for another organization? What if there is a Canadian citizen working for the United Nations? Do they need to apply to be able to do that work? All of a sudden, the clarity is not there, and organizations that desperately want to get into Afghanistan and provide that help do not know what the bill would mean. They do not know what those expectations would be. They do not know what they would be legally allowed to do, and for an organization, that is terrifying. It is very frightening for any organization to think that it may be forced to stop doing the important work it does because it has broken regulations the government has put in place that the organization does not even understand and that have not been explained.
We do not know how the bill would work with smaller organizations or diaspora organizations. For a long time I have called on the government to increase the support for small and medium-sized organizations and for diaspora organizations. These organizations on the ground know the context and the communities. They have long relationships with these communities, but the legislation before us would make it much harder for them to be able to provide support.
Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan is a phenomenal organization in Alberta. Right now it is doing everything it can to get educational products to women and girls in Afghanistan. Despite not being able to receive funding and all the things that are happening right now, it is still trying so desperately to get education to women and girls in Afghanistan. As Canadians we should be proud of an organization like that, but the legislation would make it harder for Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan to do the work it needs to do.
Then, we look at the processing piece of the bill. We have a situation right now where Global Affairs Canada is not able to process things as quickly as it promised. This is not a slight in any way on the overburdened bureaucrats at Global Affairs Canada. It is not able to move things forward as fast as it would like because it is understaffed and overburdened; moreover, the clarity from the Liberal government has not been there.
We can think about the urgent situation we find ourselves in, and then we have a situation where urgency is required and we are asking Global Affairs Canada to add another layer of burden to those who cannot keep up with the current burden. This is not a system that will work. A carve-out would mean that all humanitarian organizations would be free to go forward. The legislation before us would mean that we have just kicked that can down the road again; once more, we are failing Afghanistan. Once more, the Canadian government has failed to live up to its obligations to Afghans.
I, for one, stand in this place. I am happy to work with anyone to make the bill better so that it meets the needs it has to meet for the people of Afghanistan. I am ready to stand in this place and work with anyone to make sure Afghans are no longer being failed by the Canadian government.
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- Feb/10/23 11:28:24 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, Afghan women and girls cannot go to school. They cannot see a doctor. They are prisoners in their own country. For 18 months, these women and girls should have been getting help from Canadian organizations. Instead, Canada's so-called “feminist government” continues to fail Afghans by delaying a humanitarian carve-out.
How much longer will the Minister of Public Safety make women and girls in Afghanistan wait? How many more women and girls in Afghanistan will die before he acts?
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- Feb/10/23 10:58:23 a.m.
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- Re: Bill S-8
Madam Speaker, I wrote to the then minister of foreign affairs in February of 2021 to demand he take action so that we would not have been in a situation where people were not able to get out of Afghanistan when Kabul fell. Of course, nothing was done. An election was called instead.
However, I wonder if the member agrees we should have the current Minister of Public Safety, the current Minister of International Development and the previous minister of foreign affairs give some testimony in this place so we can be assured that no fraud took place.
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- Feb/9/23 4:26:49 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, a lot of my colleague's discussion today focused on human rights, which, of course, is very important to me. I do wonder why the government has not taken the opportunity to push for human rights for people around the world.
The people of Afghanistan have been waiting for a very long time for the government to do a humanitarian carve-out. It has been promising this for 18 months. If Liberals really do believe in human rights, why are they not pushing for that?
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- Feb/1/23 7:44:42 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, universities in Canada are losing millions of dollars because study permits are not being processed in time.
Iranians trying to escape from their murderous terrorist regime are waiting years for news on whether loved ones can come and when they can come.
In Afghanistan, there are nine female members of Parliament. The current government could get them out today. It could get them to safety today, and it is choosing not to do that.
For Hong Kongers, right now there is a program that is going to expire, and the current government has done nothing to ensure that it is extended.
Ukrainians in my riding have not been able to study at university because the current government has failed to give them a study permit.
That is not a solution.
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- Feb/15/22 10:05:41 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, today I am honoured to rise to present a petition on behalf of many Canadians, in particular, many Afghan Canadians, who are deeply concerned that the Government of Canada has failed to meet its obligations to the people of Afghanistan. Today marks six months since Kabul fell. This is six months that Afghans have struggled under a brutal Taliban regime.
The signatories to this petition call upon the Government of Canada to do more to resettle the promised 40,000 Afghan refugees. They urge the government to work with the Afghan-Canadian community to increase resettlement, remove barriers and increase channels for Afghans to come to Canada. Canada must act urgently. Six months is too long.
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