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The Conservatives have written to the Prime Minister to demand that he clarify his position on the forced labour of the mainly Muslim Uyghur minority in China after a Liberal MP was accused of attempting to cast doubt on the existence of the practice.

Michael Chong, the Conservative foreign affairs critic, wrote to Mark Carney Friday asking him if his assessment is “that Uyghur forced labour has and is being used” in China.

He also asked him to clarify if, during his official visit to China in January, he pro-actively raised the issue of human rights. Mr. Chong also asked if Mr. Carney is committed to upholding trade agreements that require Ottawa to prevent the importation of products produced using forced labour.

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Michael Ma, a Liberal MP who crossed the floor from the Conservatives in December, has been under fire for questions he asked of an expert during a meeting of the Commons Industry Committee on Thursday.

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Rushan Abbas, Washington-based founder and executive director of the two-time Nobel Peace Prize nominated Campaign for Uyghurs, said Uyghur forced labour is well documented and UN experts said this year that the conditions may amount to enslavement.

“I am deeply alarmed by the remarks of Canadian MP Michael Ma, suggesting that if one has not personally seen forced labor in China, it cannot be true,” she said in a statement. “By that logic, every dictatorship could erase its crimes simply by hiding them well enough.”

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The [Canadian] House of Commons in 2021 passed a motion recognizing a Uyghur “genocide.”

Mehmet Tohti, executive director of the Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project, said in a text message that Mr. Ma has either “not done his homework or completely ignored the fact of atrocity crimes that Uyghurs are facing, including ongoing genocide, ongoing forced labour and transnational repression.”

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Canada-Hong Kong Link, a non-profit organization, said in a statement that Mr. Ma’s call for “first-hand” testimony, when there are strict access restrictions imposed by the Chinese Communist Party, “reflects an approach often used to undermine credible human rights evidence and avoid accountability.”

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Ms. McCuaig-Johnston had testified before MPs that Chinese electric vehicles are being manufactured with parts from aluminum made by slave labourers in Xinjiang. She referred to research by Human Rights Watch and gave Mr. Ma a report to read after the committee meeting.

She said in an e-mail Friday that bauxite is shipped from other parts of China to Xinjiang where it is processed into aluminum by Uyghurs. That aluminum is sent to vehicle and parts companies in Xinjiang and other parts of the country to be put into the cars.

Ms. McCuaig-Johnston, a former senior federal public servant, said since December, 2024, she has been sanctioned by China for being a member of the Advisory Board of the Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project.

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The massive Site C work camp near Fort St. John is getting a second life instead of heading to a landfill.

B.C. Hydro said Friday it will relocate most of the 1,700-person camp to house workers building the North Coast Transmission Line across northwest B.C.

B.C. Energy Minister Adrian Dix says the decision follows a year of pressure from local communities concerned the facility would be demolished and fill up the region's landfill.

"What to do with it was a significant question in particular for people in Fort St. John," Dix said.

"There was concern that too much of it was going to end up as some sort of landfill. That was a concern and we want to use it. It's an excellent facility that can be reused."

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Inside the country, Iranians have been blocked by the Iranian regime from accessing the global internet. It’s now been nearly a month since the internet blackout began.

Internet access in the country remains shut down since the United States and Israel launched attacks on the country.

[Irainian-Canadian] Parsaei’s parents, two brothers and countless cousins are currently living in Iran.

“It impacts our families a lot,” she said. “I found that myself, I am just overwhelmed, but I try to be strong to fight for our people.”

Parsaei spoke with her brother last week for the Persian New Year, but it was only for a couple of minutes.

She doesn’t know when she’ll be able to talk with her family next.

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Earlier this year, Iran’s government restricted internet access during widespread protests.

Tech analyst Carmi Levy says there are creative ways folks inside Iran have been communicating with people outside of the country.

“For example, there have been an estimated 50,000 Starlink terminals that have been smuggled into the country and those are being used for intermittent connectivity,” he said.

“There are what we call Bluetooth mesh networks, so apps like Bitchat that allow connectivity without using the internet and the more people who use them, the greater the range and that allows messages to get in and out under the radar of the regime.”

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Levy says virtual private networks (VPN) are also often a go-to for communicating when you don’t want the government to be able to see what you’re talking about.

He said although there are ways to communicate with the outside world, it does come at a risk.

“The government is looking for this activity and is punishing this activity,” he said. “When you are trying to communicate with someone back home, recognize it’s not going to be an hour-long FaceTime or video conference call, it’s going to be short text messages simply to confirm that everything is okay.”

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As for Parsaei, she says she will do everything she can to get in touch with her family more often, but notes it’s virtually impossible.

She said she’s taking things day by day.

“It seems that we are having two lives now,” she said. “We have here our children, our work, our family, everything that we need to take care of ourselves here. At the same time, we are worried about back home, our family there.”

“Iranian people don’t have any voice. We are trying to be their voice here. We are fighting.”

Archive: [ https://archive.is/pPMwS ]

“This (law) is the most significant rollback of refugee rights in Canada in over a decade,” said Adam Sadinsky of the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers. “It’s disappointing that Canada has joined other countries in a race to the bottom in terms of protection of rights for migrants and vulnerable people.”

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At the [Canadian] Industry Committee on Thursday, MPs were hearing from experts on China as they were examining Canada’s electric vehicle policy. The Mark Carney Liberals just recently announced an agreement with China to bring in 49,000 Chinese EVs, growing to 70,000 per year within five years.

There are real concerns about the safety and security of these vehicles, concerns that have been raised by many countries including Australia, Poland, the United States, Britain and Israel.

Rather than engage on the issues at hand, Ma decided to attack a witness as not competent and then ask questions that could have been written directly by Beijing. The witness in question was Margaret McCuaig-Johnston, an expert on China and former civil servant who worked for every federal government from the one led by Pierre Trudeau through the government of Stephen Harper.

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McCuaig-Johnston is widely respected in Ottawa but now loathed in Beijing. Based on the treatment he gave her on Thursday, by Ma as well.

“Do you have an advanced degree in technology and cyber security? Yes or No?” Ma asked McCuaig-Johnston.

She had been critical of the spying components of Chinese EVs, something that everyone watching the file has been concerned about. Ma knew that the answer was no; he just wanted to undermine her by pointing that out.

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Here is the full exchange between Liberal MP Michael Ma and Margaret McQuaig-Johnston at the industry committee where MP Ma sounds like he's running interference for the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing.

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In a statement after the fact shared to Facebook, Ma claimed he was talking not about Xinjiang but the Chinese city of Shenzhen where BYD, a major Chinese EV producer has plants. The reason this statement is unbelievable is that McCuaig-Johnston had already been speaking about forced labour and had been asked about forced labour in Xinjiang.

Given the context of the questioning, and the statements that came before Ma's questions, this does not seem plausible at all.

McCuaig-Johnston, and any reasonable person listening to the exchange, would have assumed he was asking about Xinjiang where forced labour is well documented. After the meeting, McCuaig-Johnston says she gave Ma a report on forced labour in Xinjiang and he accepted it and didn’t try to correct the record with her. He only did that hours after the meeting was over in a social media post.

For her part, McCuaig-Johnston had been clearly talking about Xinjiang and specifically auto parts made with aluminum through forced labour in that province.

Whether he wanted to or not, Ma was parroting lines from Beijing, muddying the waters for China’s dictatorship that was cheered on by state-aligned media.

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All of this comes after Carney’s Liberals pulled their MPs from a multi-party trip to Taiwan so as to not upset Beijing. We have had a new trade agreement with Taiwan ready since last April for final signature, but the Carney government has not moved forward.

Meanwhile, Carney has moved forward with an attempt to not just increase trade with China but to make China a strategic partner and a place to pivot to, away from the United States.

It’s as if we learned nothing from the attempts by China to interfere in our elections over several years or from the public inquiry called as a result.

Ma’s performance on Thursday was shameful, but sadly in line with the behaviour of the Liberal Party of late.

Archived link

Canadian Energy Minister Tim Hodgson said Friday the federal government is opposed to forced labour, a day after another Liberal MP cast doubt on China's labour practices.

On Thursday, MP Michael Ma apologized after appearing to question reports of human rights abuses in China while engaging with a witness at a parliamentary committee hearing earlier in the evening.

In a written statement, Ma said he regretted making a mistake by making remarks at the committee which "inadvertently came across as dismissive of the serious issue of forced labour."

He had asked an expert during the hearing on Thursday whether she'd seen forced labour with her own eyes. In his statement later, Ma pointed out he had referred to the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen and not Xinjiang, where the Communist government has been accused of widespread abuses.

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Speaking to reporters in Markham, Ont., on Friday, Hodgson deferred questions on whether Ma should remain in the party's caucus to Prime Minister Mark Carney, who did not hold a scheduled news conference during an event in Halifax on Friday.

"Michael has already commented to the press. He said that his views did not reflect the views of the Liberal party. He has apologized for those views," Hodgson told reporters when asked if Ma should remain in the Liberal caucus.

But Ma made no such acknowledgment in the apology posted to his social media, or in his statement to The Canadian Press. His statement, did however say he condemned forced labour "in all its forms."

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Conservative foreign affairs critic Michael Chong published an open letter to Carney on Friday calling on the prime minister to "urgently" clarify his position on forced labour and the Uyghur minority in China.

"Your position on this matter also directly affects those here at home," Chong wrote.

"Canadians in the Chinese community have been subject to threats and intimidation from (the People's Republic of China) for the simple act of speaking out on these very issues. Many also worry about families still in the PRC who may face consequences or punishment from the government of the PRC."

The United Nations reported in 2022 that China had committed serious human rights violations in Xinjiang against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities that “may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.”

A report issued that same year by Global Affairs Canada concluded China “is using otherwise legitimate programs for retraining and relocation of unemployed workers as instruments of a broader campaign of oppression, exploitation and indoctrination of the Uyghur Muslim population into Han (majority) Chinese culture.”

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Can this decal get me into actual legal trouble?

In the last 15 years I've been left angry notes, my tires deflated, and I've been keyed. Can someone accuse this as hate speech under the new bill?

I'm sure this is protected under the charter but I just want to say I seriously HATE this hate speech bill. What a load of garbage.

https://x.com/MarkJCarney/status/2037215196427518182

Hereby, we, the undersigned, call on international law enforcement agencies, including the RCMP, Europol, and Interpol, as well as human rights organizations, to investigate and take immediate action against a growing wave of organized violence and digital persecution done by the Iranian diaspora monarchists targeting independent Iranian activists.

This group of extremists have already threatened opposers of the Iranian monarchy for countless number of times and by different means; including direct threats to physical harm, rape, etc. through social media platforms and directly during protests on the streets of European countries, Canada, United States, etc.

A recent murder case conducted by the Canada police department found Masoud Masjoudi, an Iranian mathematician and activist residence of Canada, murdered by two Iranian monarchists: Mehdi Ahmadzadeh Razavi (48) and Arezou Soltani (45), both residents of British Columbia. The motive is still under investigation (Global News).

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Investigators in the U.S. and Canada have cautioned that it is too early to determine a cause and that several safeguards would have had to fail for a disaster of this magnitude to occur.

In aviation safety, this is known as the Swiss Cheese Model, which compares the holes in stacked slices of cheese to weaknesses in different layers of safety defences. The holes rarely all line up. But when they do, an error can pass through.

One of the errors now drawing concern from Canadian aviation safety experts is runway incursions, like the one leading up to the collision at LaGuardia.

In 2010, the year the TSB added runway incursions to its watchlist, Nav Canada recorded 334 of them. In its 2025 financial year, Nav Canada recorded 612 runway incursions at Canadian airports between Sept. 1 and Aug. 31, according to data provided to CBC News.

At a news conference on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, members of Parliament and human-rights advocates mark the twentieth anniversary of the abduction and imprisonment in China of Huseyin Celil, a Canadian citizen and Uyghur rights advocate.

According to the Raoul Wallenberg Centre, Huseyin Celil is a Canadian citizen and Uyghur rights activist, who fled prison and torture in China after speaking up for Uyghur religious, cultural, and linguistic rights.

In 2006, was illegally detained in Uzbekistan, sent to China, charged with terrorism and splitism, and sentenced to death, which was later changed to life in prison, much of which in solitary confinement. No one has made contact since 2016, when the crackdown against Uyghurs began to escalate.

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Amid Prime Minister Mark Carney’s calls that the Canada-U.S. relationship is ruptured, Ottawa has committed $175 million to a mining project in northern Quebec whose major U.S. investor is closely linked to the Trump administration.

Energy and Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson says the Carney government’s support for the rare earth mine is necessary to protect Canadian jobs and the economy.

"We're doing things that are exceptional because we are in exceptional times," Hodgson told the fifth estate in an interview.

"I'll go back to what the prime minister said: We are in a hinge moment. We are in a rupture. We need to respond to that."

What makes the Strange Lake deposit so enticing to governments and private investors is the presence of heavy rare earth elements, most notably dysprosium and terbium, which are key to the magnets used in everything from electric vehicles to fighter jets and missiles.