Canadian MPs unanimously reject China’s sovereignty over Tibet
Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, the Member of Parliament for the Lac-Saint-Jean riding in Canada, speaking in Canada’s parliament. Source: @Alduceppe/’X’
Written by: Aidan Jonah
Canadian parliamentarians have unanimously voted for a non-binding motion, put forward by Bloc Québécois MP Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, that refers to Tibetans as “a people and a nation” who should get self-determination. This, having occurred on June 10, 2024, is a fundamental rejection of China’s sovereign control of the Tibet Autonomous Region, and an indisputable attack on China’s sovereignty.
The Canada Files has covered the subtle attacks of Canadian Members of Parliament (MPs) on China’s sovereignty over Tibet – where 24 MPs, including four Liberal cabinet ministers, met with a Tibet separatist leader who came to Canada, “to garner support for Tibetan freedom struggle” - and of Canada’s government towards China’s Taiwan province – via support for Taiwan province’s participation in the World Health Organization and World Health Assembly forums only meant for sovereign countries - among other actions throughout 2023.
This week’s vote is even more wild of an escalation than this author could have predicted in July 2023, when covering the Canadian parliament’s “Subcommittee on International Human Rights of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development” report driven by claims of a CIA-funded Tibet separatist organization which claimed boarding schools in Tibet were perpetrating cultural genocide. This author said back then:
“Now, it is time to wait. If history is a suitable guide, we’ll see a Canadian parliamentary vote about the ‘colonial’ Tibetan boarding schools, within the next year.”
The history referred to being a 2021 unanimous non-binding vote where Liberal cabinet ministers abstain, in which Canada’s parliament farcically declared that China was committing genocide against Uygurs in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region. That vote was driven by contributions of another CIA-front funded group, the Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project, to the same parliament subcommittee’s 2020 report. With the process before the vote, we see history rhyme.
Yet it does not repeat, because this motion goes so much further than the 2021 Xinjiang motion. While it parrots the usual nonsense of cultural repression claims, it most importantly claims that Tibetans are a separate people and nation from China who “can claim the right to self-determination”. And most importantly, Bloc Québécois MP Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe confirmed that the unanimous vote came after “discussions among the parties”, indicating that the Trudeau government, cabinet ministers included, did not oppose or even abstain on the vote.
And with the vote, Canada’s Tibet lobby jumped for joy. The Canada-Tibet Committee, which took a $38k USD grant from the CIA-front National Endowment for Democracy back in 2020, was thrilled. So was Chushi Gangdruk Canada, which is “tightly connected to Chushi Gangdruk [CG]: an organization of pro-feudalism Tibetan guerrilla fighters, which was created after the People's Liberation Army took control of Tibet in 1951”. So was Students for a Free Tibet Canada – the organization which birthed the political career of Tibet separatist Ontario MPP Bhutila Karpoche - which doesn’t declare their finances publicly, and whose parent organization Students for a Free Tibet takes money from the CIA-front NED. It is no shock that the CIA-front NED funded Tibet Action Institute, which the NED praised for managing to “put the idea of Tibet sovereignty back on the map”, was also supportive of the non-binding motion.
The nature of the Tibet separatist struggle itself is truly odious, as this author previously explained:
The “Tibetan freedom struggle” from its beginning has consisted of a CIA-funded theocratic fight-back against the PRC’s liberation of Tibetan serfs from a theocracy which was “not even recognized by any other countries as an independent state until the Communists gained control of Tibet and China as a whole.”
Declassified Canadian cables from 1950 described the Tibetan regime as such:
“The spiritual and temporal spheres of authority are combined in a theocracy under the Dalai Lama, who is believed by Tibetans to be a reincarnation of a Buddha and who resides in a monastery-palace in Lhasa. The administrative system is maintained chiefly through the local authority of the wide-spread monasteries, which are linked together by a common veneration for the parson of the Dalai Lama.” …
[Since] becoming “an autonomous region of China, the Tibetan people have seen a drastic improvement in life expectancy and living conditions. After the CIA backed counter-revolution failed, more than 1 million serfs, 95 per cent of Tibet’s population were freed from serfdom. The average life expectancy of a Tibetan was 35.5 years before the PLA took control of Tibet, and rose to 70.6 years as of 2019”, while also protecting Buddhism. The state delivering these achievements is what Tibet dissidents are fighting against.
How will China react to Canada’s continuous attacks on its sovereignty and by extension Chinese citizens in the Tibet Autonomous Region? We’ll have to wait and see.
Editor’s note: The Canada Files is the country's only news outlet focused on Canadian foreign policy. We've provided critical investigations & hard-hitting analysis on Canadian foreign policy since 2019, and need your support.
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Aidan Jonah is the Editor-in-Chief of The Canada Files, a socialist, anti-imperialist news outlet founded in 2019. Jonah wrote a report for the 48th session of the UN Human Rights Council, held in September 2021.
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