WHEN DEMOCRACY IS AT ITS BEST.

Yazidi policy high-water mark for Parliament

Politics is dreadful everywhere and always, yes? Well, no — not entirely. There are still doings worth celebrating, particularly, these days, in Canada.

For recent evidence, look to Calgary-area Conservative MP Michelle Rempel and the compromise she recently struck — or rather engineered — with Immigration Minister John McCallum, yielding a new, challenging and far more honest Canadian policy toward helping Yazidi victims of genocide, if the former Liberal posture can be called a policy at all.

The unanimous Commons vote Oct. 25 for Rempel’s motion recognizing the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant is carrying out genocide on the Yazidi people, and requiring that Canada effect a rescue of Yazidi women and girls within 120 days, was a high-water mark for this parliament, so far. It was a victory, not just for Rempel and the Tories, but for the Liberals, too, in a backhanded sort of way.

To gauge how remarkable a moment this was, we need only re-examine the frame, created a year ago during the 2015 federal campaign. It was the question of refugees — specifically from the Syrian civil war and the war with ISIL in Iraq — that dominated the 78-day contest. The debate over the niqab, the veil worn by a few Canadian Muslim women, rounded out a campaign that got away from the Conservatives early and stayed ahead of them for the duration.

It was in early October, three weeks before voting day, that the story broke of the Prime Minister’s Office having intervened in the selection of refugees from Syria. The subtext was that senior members of the Harper government, perhaps the PM himself, were unhappy with the UN refugee-selection process. The slam against them — which the Liberals and New Democrats seized on with alacrity — was that the governing Conservatives had prioritized Christian and other non-Muslim refugees over Muslims.

The next day, Harper defended his government’s policy, arguing it made sense to protect the most vulnerable, those targeted for the most horrific oppression, persecution, slavery, mass rape and mass murder by ISIL. That included any expression of Islam not recognized as theologically sound by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s monstrous caliphate.

Yazidis, of whom there used to be about 700,000 mostly in northern Iraq, are not strictly Muslim in an orthodox sense. The religion blends elements of Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Sufism (an esoteric strain of Islam) and Shia. That makes Yazidis apostates in ISIL’s theo-fascist conception, and thus marked for slavery and death, more so even than Christians or Jews.

The point is that, election rhetoric aside, Harper had a point, which has been horribly borne out since. But coming off the campaign, during which the Liberals vowed to never single out any category of refugee based on religion or ethnicity, the new government’s blinkers were firmly in place. It didn’t help that it was struggling last spring to justify its ill-considered pullout of Canadian CF-18 fighters from the Iraq war, a task that could only get more difficult if the genocide were formally acknowledged.

That may be why, in March, after U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry declared ISIL was guilty of genocide against Christians and other religious minorities in Iraq and Syria, Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion initially refused to follow suit. It wasn’t until mid-June, after the release of the UN report, They came to destroy: ISIS Crimes Against the Yazidis, that he relented. But even then, until Rempel’s motion, there was no formal parliamentary declaration as such.

Two things stand out politically. The first is the consummate skill and determination with which Rempel, a junior minister in the Harper government, used the Trudeau government’s own political ideology to lever it around to her way of thinking.

In her speech to the Commons on Oct. 20, she referred to some of the most shameful acts of official cowardice in Canadian history — including the Komagata Maru affair, the Chinese head tax, the internment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War, the turning away of the MS St. Louis in 1939, and the residential school system.

This was an echo of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s own words, in the “liberty” speech of March 9, 2015, in which he re-asserted his party’s claim to cultural and religious pluralism and the bedrock of minority rights in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Rempel’s rebuttal boiled down to this: “Oh? Then prove you meant all that.” Faced with the clarity and sincerity of her moral outrage, the Liberals were disarmed.

And that’s what’s laudable about the government’s response: it heard the lone opposition MP and, despite being buttressed by a big majority and strong public support, recognized its position was morally untenable, and changed.

I am not aware of this having happened much (ever?) during the Harper majority years or during any of Jean Chrétien’s three majority terms, for that matter. More like this, please.