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Tuesday’s showdown vote was a similarly rare thing: a unanimous, cross-party vote that should be understood as a rebuke to a sitting government, even with the amendments that expunged a stern condemnation and extended the government’s remedial action timeline for providing asylum to Yazidi women and girls to 120 days from 30 days.

Immigration Minister John McCallum tried to head off the embarrassment on Monday by affirming that he was committed to the Conservative motion. His officials had been poking around Iraqi Kurdistan scoping out the scene, Yazidi refugees will now be a Canadian priority, and some yet-to-be-determined number of Yazidi refugees would be brought to Canada over the next four months. During House committee meetings this past summer, the number of Yazidi refugees admitted to Canada was guesstimated by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada officials at nine. McCallum came off, at best, as an unserious person.

I have never been more angry. I know that anger is a raw emotion and not necessarily the best thing to push public policy on. But I have never been more angry

On Tuesday, after the count was in and the motion had passed without a single dissenter, Rempel told me she was content with the result. But she also told me this:

“I have never been more angry. I know that anger is a raw emotion and not necessarily the best thing to push public policy on. But I have never been more angry.”

Rempel has every right to be angry.

The Yazidis are an ancient religious minority of about 700,000 people, targeted for extermination by the so-called Islamic State in the autumn of 2014. The landscape of the Yazidi homelands in the Shingal Mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan is now pockmarked with the mass graves of Yazidi men. Yazidi women and girls have been enslaved by the thousands, subjected to rape and torture, forced abortions and innumerable unspeakable obscenities. Thousands of Yazidi women have escaped the jihadist nightmare, but most cower as “internally displaced persons” in Iraq, beyond the reach of the UN refugee system. More than 1,000 of the women have been taken in by Germany. Other than that, they are pretty well friendless.