A police officer stands guard inside the closed loop bubble for the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics near the main media centre at Olympic Park in Beijing, on Jan. 29, 2022. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)
By Omid Ghoreishi
Nearly half of Canadians won’t be watching the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, while 60 percent say Canada should boycott the Games because of China’s human rights record, a new survey shows.
The Games started in China today. Many countries, including Canada, have imposed a diplomatic boycott on the event, meaning they won’t be sending any government representatives or diplomats to the Games due to Beijing’s human rights violations.
The online poll, conducted by Research Co., found that 47 percent of respondents say they will make a conscious effort to refrain from watching the Games in Beijing.
The poll also shows that 59 percent of respondents think Canada should completely boycott the Games due to the Beijing regime’s human rights record.
“Sizeable majorities of Canadians who reside in Quebec (66 percent) and British Columbia (also 66 percent) are in favour of a full boycott of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics,” Mario Canseco, president of Research Co, said in a news release.
“Support for a full boycott is also high in Atlantic Canada (58 percent), Ontario (57 percent) and Manitoba and Saskatchewan (56 percent).”
The communist regime in China is consistently listed as one of the worst human rights offenders in the world in reports published by human rights organizations, such as Freedom House.
Freedom House’s 2021 report says that in 2020, China’s authorities “increased restrictions on religious practice by Chinese Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims throughout China under 2018 regulations on religious affairs, and persecution of the banned spiritual movement Falun Gong continued unabated.”
Just weeks before the games were to begin, a Beijing court sentenced Xu Na, a Falun Gong practitioner and artist, to eight years in prison for providing photos and information to The Epoch Times during the early coronavirus outbreak in China.
The Chinese regime has arrested or punished a number of people attempting to reveal information about the outbreak, including Dr. Li Wenliang who was among the first people warning about a new deadly virus in China in early 2020.
“The world must heed the lessons of Beijing 2008 Games, when Chinese government promises of human rights improvements never materialized,” Alkan Akad, Amnesty International’s China researcher, said in a statement on Jan. 14.
“The Beijing Winter Olympics must not be allowed to pass as a mere sportswashing opportunity for the Chinese authorities, and the international community must not become complicit in a propaganda exercise.”
The Beijing Olympics will run from Feb. 4 to Feb. 20.
The Research Co. survey also showed that 72 percent of respondents are worried about the health and safety of Canadian athletes participating in the Games.
The survey was conducted from Jan. 21 to Jan. 23 with 1,000 people in Canada. The margin of error is +/- 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
Omid Ghoreishi is an Epoch Times reporter based in Toronto.