OTTAWA, October 27, 2020 – Randy Hoback, Member of Parliament for the federal riding of Prince Albert was elected Co-Chair of the resurrected Canada – Venezuela Parliamentary Friendship Group.
Mr. Hoback resurrected the Friendship Group as a vehicle for Canadian Parliamentarians to support and collaborate with Venezuelan Opposition legislators experiencing persecution by the regime led by Nicolas Maduro.
According to Human Rights Watch, the Venezuelan government has jailed political opponents and disqualified them from running for office. As of 2019, Venezuelan prisons and intelligence services offices held more than 230 political prisoners
The U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights has also reported that Maduro’s forces extra-judicially killed 6,856 innocent people between 2018 and May of 2019. Two-thousand Venezuelans were also killed between January and August of this year.
In January 2019, Canada joined the United States, the Organization of American States, and ten other Latin American states in recognizing Venezuela’s parliamentary speaker, Juan Guaido, as the country’s interim president.
The Government of Canada has called on all political parties and institutions in Venezuela to engage promptly in, or in support of, a process that will establish a broadly acceptable transitional government that will administer free and fair presidential elections soon and begin to set the country on a pathway to recovery.