Meaningless vote won't help Uyghurs

THE SPECTATORS ARE WISER, MORE ALERT THAN THE ACTORS.

— REX MURPHY

The vote in Parliament Monday to condemn China for its alleged genocide against the country's Muslim uyghur minority was a travesty at every level. First, the motion put forward by the Conservative party was non-binding on the government and therefore its passage in the house of Commons is essentially meaningless.

What's more, while it is not in dispute that China has committed egregious human rights violations, which may be classified as crimes against humanity against the uyghur, it is not at all clear that its actions meet the stringent definition of genocide set forth by the united Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

To apply this definition of genocide to actions short of an attempt to exterminate an ethnic, linguistic, racial, or religious minority is to devalue the concept, a term which was conceptualized in the wake of the attempt to exterminate the Jewish people by Nazi Germany and its allies.

Canada has seen previous instances of the abuse of the term genocide such as the 2017 motion approved by the Ontario parliament to brand anti-Sikh violence in India in 1984 as a genocide. What happened can most accurately be described as a pogrom against the Sikh minority following the assassination of the then Indian prime minister, Indira Gandhi, by her Sikh bodyguards. It comes nowhere close to the definition of genocide. That it passed in Ontario is more a reflection of the power of the India-hating Sikh lobby in Canada than what actually happened in India in 1984.

The vote in the house of Commons on the uyghurs in China also represents a failure for the Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who stayed away from the vote along with his entire cabinet, except for the sacrificial lamb offered to the opposition in the form of Canada's Foreign Affairs Minister, Marc Garneau.

by declining to issue a whip and declaring the motion a free vote, the government sidestepped its responsibility to take a position on whether what has transpired in China actually constitutes a genocide against the uyghurs. All one heard from Garneau were the usual platitudes that the government is reflecting on the situation.

The Trudeau government's contortions on the vote reflect the reality that its concern about human rights in China is more rhetorical than real. As I argued here recently, Canada's actions speak louder than its words. despite the government's protestations about human rights abuses in China, the Canada Pension Plan Investment board, a Crown corporation which invests public money, is invested in China to the tune of $56 billion or almost 12 per cent of its total portfolio, some in companies that have provable links to human rights abuses including against the uyghurs.

Canadians have to ask themselves whether they are willing to put their money where their mouth is when it comes to penalizing countries that systematically abuse human rights such as China. The bulk of the reactions to my earlier column professed concerns about human rights in China but believed that the CPPIb must secure the highest return on its investment even if it means investing in problematic Chinese firms. The cognitive dissonance is glaring.

Any serious action to punish a country such as China for its human rights violations, whether they rise to the level of genocide or not, is necessarily going to be costly to the country doing the punishing. Whether you like him or not, former u.S. President donald Trump's administration blacklisted Chinese firms with problematic human rights records, thereby barring u.S. investors from those companies. These investors necessarily had to take a pass on the lucrative returns on offer and unwind their positions or else earn the wrath of the u.S. government.

The Canadian political class, not just the government but opposition parties, seem to want to have their cake and eat it too: to condemn China in overly extravagant terms for its human rights failures while continuing to make money hand over fist while doing business with that country.

This is as obvious to the Chinese authorities as it is to observers in Canada. A non-binding vote in the house of Commons will only tell Chinese leaders that Canada is not serious when it professes to care about their human rights abuses, and that despite all of the noise, Canada will continue business as usual with China.

All it serves to do is to degrade Canada's credibility in the eyes of its interlocutors in the international community, not least in beijing.

The vote does nothing to help the uyghurs, nor to punish the Chinese, and is a testimony to the cynicism and futility of symbolic politics and tokenism at its very worst.

CANADA WILL CONTINUE BUSINESS AS USUAL WITH CHINA.

Marc Garneau