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Melanie Marquis Press
“We are not asking our athletes to give up their Olympic dream, because we are very aware of the considerable efforts that they will have had to deploy to hope to be able to achieve it”, write about thirty signatories in a letter obtained Press before its publication and whose instigator is the Bloc member Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe.
“We believe, however, that there is still time to demand that the International Olympic Committee organize the Games elsewhere if the Chinese government continues in its genocidal delirium,” [afin de] refuse to participate, through this great planetary sporting festival, in a sinister staging aimed at the self-aggrandizement of a regime which commits the worst crimes against humanity against its own population ”, we read in the letter.
The approach does not aim to “take our sporting elite hostage, [mais à] to ensure that the medals that they and that they will win in 2022 are not soiled by what history will undoubtedly remember, after those in Berlin in 1936, as being the Games of shame ”, plead the signatories, among which is the gold medalist Jean-Luc Brassard.
He said he was very aware of the chances that the plea would be heard by the IOC – they are simply non-existent. “I’m not kidding myself. It will not arrive. I grew up in the Olympic movement, I know how it works ”, he drops in an interview with The Press. And why not ? It’s a question of big money, slice Jean-Luc Brassard.
“The biggest sponsors of the IOC right now are Chinese companies like Alibaba, among others. So when we leave money talks . The IOC granted the Games to China, and at the time, human rights was no better, and it did the same, he notes. And there are contracts that have been signed, so at the limit, China could come back against the IOC. ”
Boycott?
About a year before the scheduled opening of international sporting competition in Beijing, calls for an outright boycott of the Olympics began to be heard – an option that the Canadian Olympic Committee and the Canadian Paralympic Committee have brushed aside. ‘a backhand in an open letter published on Thursday in the pages of The Press.
IOC Dean, Canadian Richard Pound, also opposed it in interviews with English-speaking media this week. He told The Canadian Press on Friday that a boycott would be doing to athletes what pressure groups blame China for doing. “In a way, you are depriving Canadian athletes of their rights and putting them in jail for a political move that should bring about a change of approach,” he said.
The letter written by Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe does not advocate this approach either. But we are betting that the approach will make people aware of the treatment that the Chinese regime reserves for Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region. In a report tabled by a House subcommittee in October 2020, “genocide” is mentioned.
PHOTO JUSTIN TANG, THE CANADIAN PRESS
Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, Member of the Bloc Québécois
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“In light of the testimonies it gathered during its hearings in 2018 and 2020, the subcommittee is convinced that the actions of the Chinese Communist Party constitute genocide under the terms of the Genocide convention », decided the sub-committee, of which the member Brunelle-Duceppe is a member. The Chinese government was outraged by this conclusion, which it called a lie.
The letter calling for the relocation of the Games was signed by at least one member of all parties in the House of Commons and the National Assembly, as well as by the former Liberal Minister Irwin Cotler and the Assembly of First Nations Quebec -Labrador, among others.
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