Canada prepares big coup against China's darkest 'business'

For the past two decades, the Chinese regime has been killing prisoners of conscience for their organs. The buying and selling of human life has become an industry, and Canada, among other developed countries, have been supporting it. In 2014, Dr. Jeff Zaltzman, chief of kidney transplantation at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto, revealed that he alone had at least 50 patients who had gone to China for transplants. Zaltzman has since advocated for changing legislation to address the problem of forced organ harvesting. In fact, Canada has been identified as one of the top seven organ-importing countries along with the United States, Australia, Israel, Japan, Oman, and Saudi Arabia. With few exceptions, the Canadian Criminal Code only criminalizes acts committed in Canada, so it is currently legal for Canadians to travel abroad to obtain organs from illicit sources because such acts do not take place on Canadian soil. However, this could be about to change in Canada. Several parliamentarians have been optimistic and hopeful about the progress of a bill that would create new offenses in relation to human organ trafficking, which would soon become a law. Recall that over the past 15 years, many similar bills died when parliament was dissolved. Therefore, this is a critical moment of decision for Canada. Bill S-223, introduced by Senator Salma Atuluwajan, would make it an offense for a Canadian citizen or permanent resident to travel abroad to receive an organ removed from someone who was not given informed consent to remove the organ. It would also amend the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act to deny a permanent resident or foreign national access to Canada who has engaged in activities related to human organ trafficking. The bill was passed in May in the House of Commons and was put before the Foreign Affairs Committee on November 23 for review in a private hearing. Liberal MP Samir Zuberi, who was the second sponsor of the bill, told the Epoch Times that Canada cannot accept illegal orgas harvesting and that this issue must be addressed in a concrete manner. Conservative MP Gary Gene Youse said he is confident the bill will pass. He also recounted that a long road has been traveled since parliament first sought legislative measures to combat forced organ removal and trafficking in 2008. This bill has been 15 years in the making. It was Canadians who really identified the problem of forced organ harvesting and trafficking and exposed it to the world, and yet our country is taking so long to finally legislate on the issue. The first law aimed at combating human organ trafficking was proposed by former Liberal MP Boris Wrzeniewski in 2008. His bill, C-500, was introduced in February of that year but died when parliament was dissolved. In 2009, a second attempt was made with Bill C-381, which also died when parliament was dissolved. In 2013, then-Liberal MP Irwin Cotler introduced similar legislation, Bill C-561, which also failed to become a law. After Cotler withdrew, Gene Youse reintroduced C-561 in the 42nd parliament. In December 2019, Atul Ajan also introduced a similar bill, S-204, but after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau prorogued parliament in 2020, all legislative business ceased and the bill had only passed its first reading in the Senate. While organ trafficking is a global phenomenon, forced organ removal deserves special attention in the Chinese context. In China, this practice is state-driven and targets prisoners of conscience amounting to genocide. Forced organ harvesting in China is carried out on such a scale that it has become a lucrative and macabre industry. Since the early 2000s, Chinese hospitals have been providing live organs on demand. Perfectly matched organs can be obtained in weeks or even days. The sudden boom in organ transplants in China coincides with the start of the crackdown on Falun Gong. Since July 1999, practitioners of Falun Gong, an ancient discipline of the Buddhist school, have been imprisoned and tortured in massive numbers. During captivity, Falun Dafan practitioners have been subjected to organ and blood tests. After news surfaced in 2009 that the Chinese Communist Party was involved in forced organ harvesting, human rights activists in Canada contacted former MP David Kilgour and asked him to investigate the alleged crime. Kilgour joined forces with human rights lawyer David Matas and his investigation culminated in a report, later followed by a book titled Bloody Harvest, which concluded that the allegations were true. His findings inspired other investigations into the trade in forced organ harvesting and trafficking in China and around the world. As a result, several countries made efforts to stop practices such as organ tourism. Benedict Rogers, a renowned British human rights activist and journalist, said that the work of the 2019 China Tribunal, an independent court that investigated allegations of forced organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners in China, was instrumental in further exposing CCP crimes. In an interview with the New York Times on November 23rd, Rogers said, I think that tribunal is an incredibly important tribunal because it's an independent body, chaired by a very distinguished lawyer, saying that this barbaric practice is happening in China on a widespread level and it is a crime against humanity. Will Canada be able to step forward and end its complicity in one of the worst crimes of our time?