Mr. Speaker, before I start to speak on Bill C-22 I want to thank the Chair, the Table Officers, the staff and the pages for staying so late today on this important debate. All of us as members greatly appreciate your efforts.
This is the perhaps the last speech tonight. I want to say what an honour it has been to spend the day in the House listening to all the interventions by members from all party lines and showing a degree of co-operation we rarely ever see in this House.
We have by-passed the usual entrenched inefficiency of the House of Commons for once and managed to co-operate on an issue that one would find very difficult to disagree with. Once again I would like to add my name to the work that has been done by so many members of the Canadian public, the international community, the non governmental organizations and members of Parliament who sat in this House in the years gone by, and who sit in this House today. I would particularly like to thank members of the Reform Party for supporting this initiative as eloquently as they have and as all members from the House have.
It is a shame that it took such an issue to bring us all together. I hope that in the future we will able to perceive collectively other foreign policy initiatives which will be for the betterment of all people in this country and around the world.
Bill C-22 will save lives. As has been mentioned before, over 30,000 people are maimed by land mines, most of whom are innocent men, women and children. In my experience in dealing with land mine victims, you only have to look in the eyes of somebody who is on the operating room table, a young person who tried to seek out and find a better place to live. Look into their eyes and watch the fear they have as they peer down to see the lower part of their body blown away.
As we amputated the legs of individuals who have stepped on land mines, I could not help but reflect on the tragic circumstances those persons now face, a life which is so different from what they had before. They went in a brief second, in the click and the blink of an eye, from being a productive, healthy member of society to one that will occupy the lowest socioeconomic rung in countries racked by civil war.
These devices do not affect rich countries like ours. They affect the poorest nations of the world from Angola to Cambodia, from Somalia to Egypt, from Rwanda to the former Yugoslavia. These land mines create a terrible toll, not only in human terms but also in economies laid to waste. This bill will go a long way to preventing that carnage from occurring.
Let us look beyond land mines. Let us look to life beyond land mines and see what the future holds for us. There is life after land mines. What we can do now is reflect on the Ottawa process and use and redirect that unusual co-operation between members of the non governmental organizations and governance working together for a common goal. This cannot be left to wither away. It must be acted upon, nurtured, and redirected to address other security issues facing us all.
As we look to the 21st century and the challenges facing us as a nation as well as other nations around the world, we cannot help but reflect on the fact that we have failed in our foreign policy.
The biggest challenge is conflict. Land mines are an important part of conflict, but in the big picture they are a small part. We must look at conflict in a broader context and search for more constructive solutions.
We can reflect on the Bosnian conflict. The signs were continually there. We were continually told that the former Yugoslavia would tear apart and explode in a level of bloodshed that Europe had not seen since World War II. We the nations of the world sat on our hands and wept. We engaged at best in diplomatic initiatives and at worst in hand-wringing inefficiency when we did nothing at all.
The result was the deaths of thousands upon thousands of innocent civilians, the rapes of thousands of innocent women and the deaths of thousands of children. It was potentially an avoidable tragedy. Certainly many of those lives could have been saved.
We were repeatedly told for months on end that a massive slaughter was imminent in the great lakes region of Africa. Major-General Roméo Dallaire repeatedly warned right to the end that thousands of people would be slaughtered. What did we do? Virtually nothing. Today genocide will raise its ugly head once again in the great lakes region and again we are doing nothing.
We have it within our power to use the Ottawa process to address these significant problems. Canada is a nation state uniquely poised to change foreign policy from an era of conflict management to an era of conflict prevention.
Here are some constructive solutions. There are a number of nation states of medium power which are neutral, relatively affluent, have extraordinary diplomatic power and, above all else, have international respect. Norway, New Zealand, Australia, Austria, South Africa and Canada are some of these nations. The world is looking for a leader to bring these nation states together to form a nucleus upon which we can start to bring other countries together to change international foreign policy. We have to rethink the way we deal with each other as nation states.
The big powers, the security council members such as the United States, France, Germany, England, Russia and China, cannot do this because they have their own political baggage and are not as widely respected as the middle powers. We then can play an unusual role in working with the NGO community to address the problem.
First, we must set up an early warning monitoring system to address conflict. That early warning system could be the NGO community that would form part of the nucleus of the Ottawa process. NGOs are often the first to witness the precursors to conflict, to witness the breakdown of judicial and governmental structures, and to witness the persecution of minorities and the trampling of basic human rights.
Their input into a central region, for example the UN crisis centre in New York, would be a logical place for this information to be gathered. It could then be dealt with by the United Nations as a whole.
We are now dealing with UN reform, which involves revamping the security council and removing veto powers from its members. Again that is something with which we as a nation and the international community will have to deal.
The solutions involve the setting up of a monitoring system and the setting up of an area to receive information, the UN crisis centre. A series of responses could be put forth, responses such as diplomatic initiatives, peace building initiatives, the introduction of positive propaganda into areas that are breaking apart to bring belligerents together, the introduction of more punitive measures such as sanctions, where appropriate, and the use of international financial institutions as economic tools and levers to try to take away the fuel of war, which is money. Money drives wars. The international financial institutions give a great deal of money to a number of countries of the world, some of which are in conflict.
It is exceedingly important to pursue this issue. These are not just words. If we fail to address it we will see an explosion of ethnic conflict.
Between 1945 and 1985 there were roughly six UN peacekeeping missions that cost about $2.3 billion or 23% of the UN budget. Since 1985 to now the UN spends 77% of its budget on peacekeeping initiatives. That is more than twice as much as it spends on everything else added together. It has driven the United Nations into bankruptcy. This then is not a situation that can be sustained.
Why should Canadians be interested in this issue at all? It is for the simple reason that what happens half a world away comes home to roost sooner or later. When conflict occurs and countries explode into an orgy of bloodshed and economies are laid to waste, the responsibility for setting that up and dealing with that goes to the international community.
We incur costs in our defence budgets, our peacekeeping budgets, our aid budgets and economic reconstruction, and our social programs domestically when refugees, tragic souls, fleeing their homelands come to other countries looking for a haven. They come to our country looking for safe haven and because we signed the UN charter on refugees we are obliged to take them in, which we do. It costs us roughly $75,000 per refugee to integrate them into Canadian society. This is a lot of money. It contributes to the already weakened system we have in our social programs.
I am not blaming refugees by any stretch of the imagination but merely illustrating that in these days of economic hardship and of governments not having any money we cannot afford having increased costs placed upon us, not to mention the danger our peacekeepers and our aid workers incur when they go abroad.
A number of peacekeepers have been killed or maimed by land mines and working abroad in danger zones. Does it not make more sense for us to prevent these situations from occurring rather than pick up the pieces later on?
Furthermore once a war breaks out the seeds of ethnic discontent and future conflicts are sewn forever. One need not look any further than at the situation in Bosnia to see that country will not remain as it is in the future. It is artificially maintained right now through force. Unless we are prepared as an international community to stay in Bosnia for the next 75 years, nothing will change. Once we move, if we move before that, the country will break apart in a violent shudder. It is important for us to realize that and to initiate efforts to ensure these situations do not occur again.
Not only can the Ottawa process be applied to international military security issues. It can also be applied to the other problems that affect us from environmental issues to economic issues. We already apply many of the principles to our economic multilateral initiatives through the NAFTA, FTA, WTO and now the MAI. All these things are examples of the international community trying to work together to resolve differences.
In closing, I would like to say how proud I am to be a Reformer today, how proud I am to be a parliamentarian, and how proud I am to be a Canadian. Canadians and Canada have set a new standard of co-operation in the House and internationally to pursue objectives to help those who are most helpless, to save lives and to make our world a better place.
Mr. Speaker, I stand before you and thank the House for its time. I hope that this will not be the end of initiatives that will involve co-operation between members of the House to pursue a better Canadian society for all.