House of Commons Hansard #71 of the 37th Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament's site.) The word of the day was budget.

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Situation in IraqEmergency Debate

11:25 p.m.

Liberal

Larry Bagnell Liberal Yukon, YT

Mr. Speaker, the nations of the world are on the brink of choosing one of two sad roads. As I said in previous speeches, if the world goes to war, innocent people will die; if the world does not go to war, innocent people will die. The difficulty for each of us as politicians, and indeed for every citizen of the world in their own conscience, is which of these two sad roads we should take.

As chair of the foreign affairs caucus and member of Parliament responsible to express the views of my constituents in Yukon, it is important that I rise again for the fourth time, I believe, to talk about this very serious situation.

I will start by commending my constituents who made their decisions of conscience one way or another. I commend the hundreds of them who wrote to me to express their desire for peace, their fear of war and the ramifications it would have. I commend those who led the peace march which I participated in and gave a speech at several months ago. I commend Will Petricko and the minister of the United Church in Whitehorse who organized an event at the church, upstairs and downstairs, both for prayer and to talk about ways to achieve peace.

Finally, I want to thank Will Petricko and other Yukoners who yesterday organized hundreds of Yukoners to light peace candles across the Yukon, in two locations in Whitehorse, in Dawson and in Haines Junction. I would like to say thank you to 10 year old Vicki at the vigil who said, “I would like to say peace to everyone here and peace to the world,” and to 11 year old Jannel who said, “Peace is nothing but a dream waiting to come true”.

Some of those who are so passionately worried may have said, God bless the Prime Minister, or at least they were very relieved when he said in his speech to the House of Commons today, to a standing ovation, that if military action proceeds without a new resolution of the Security Council, Canada will not participate.

This position by the Prime Minister, and those who applauded it, is one of significant courage. In some ways it takes at least as much courage to fight for peace as it does to go to war. It is certainly no easy event for any of us, to make a decision that may not be the most pleasing to our closest friend and ally, especially one that can have a great effect on the well-being of Canadian families, but a decision of courage it was.

It was also an expression of our sovereignty. The Prime Minister, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, many of my colleagues in the House and I have always made it clear that Canada will always make its own decisions. We always have and we always will.

Good friends have the ability to respect each other's different decisions and are still friends. In the Winnipeg Free Press on March 14 Ambassador Paul Cellucci described our relationship in the following terms:

The relationship that the United States has with Canada is our most important relationship in the world.

If you think about the impact in the day-to-day lives with U.S. citizens, no other relationship even comes close.

The relationship is in good shape. We're getting things done.

I respect the right of the few people who contacted me and felt that we should stand again by our friend and neighbour in renouncing the dictator who has murdered millions. Make no mistake about Saddam Hussein. He gassed 60,000 of his own people. He used weapons of mass destruction and murdered thousands of his own people in prisons and torture chambers. He caused a million Iranians to be killed or injured in war. The world will be a better place when Saddam Hussein is gone.

To put some context on the situation where often violence, murder and upset in the Middle East occurs, we remember that the Arab Muslim world in recent decades and centuries has had much pressure and upheaval.

Other religions have invaded from the west. Other religions different from theirs have taken some control over their lives, their regions or their neighbourhoods. At the same time some of their governments that have been created are dictatorial and do not espouse the common themes of peace and justice in their own religion.

It makes it even easier for some of the dictators to survive when their regimes are funded by western civilizations through the purchase of their oil. They do not need to go to their people through democratic elections to get the views of the people. They can hold this dictatorial power and perform acts that no citizen of any nation would be proud of.

Over the last few centuries one of the solutions that has arisen is a philosophy that they should return to the traditional, very extreme religious values to the exclusion of all others. Unfortunately some of the solutions to make that return would be through violence and terrorism. Those efforts have not been that successful to overthrow the secular, dictatorial regimes. Therefore perhaps some of them, such as al-Qaeda, have turned to another solution which is to make the western countries so angry that they would intrude into the area even more than they are now, causing the people, who are now peaceful or are now middle of the road and not our enemies, to rise up with the fundamental terrorists and become strong enough to overthrow those countries.

In this context I want to outline the reasons for my own decision and personal views in this particular situation. In politics, perception is reality. These events, the invading of Iraq, have to be perceived with the proper evidence. They have to be perceived by the hundreds of millions of Muslim people around the world and in the Arab world, many of whom do not understand that there is a clear and present danger that would require military force at this time.

If someone asked me to go to war, to invade because of specific dangers, for example weapons of mass destruction, I would need the existing evidence clearly outlined to me. It would need to be sufficient enough to convince me that a state is powerful enough to be a danger to us, that it has the means to endanger us and that it is not presently contained. I have not yet been convinced. I do not believe the inspectors are convinced and certainly the United Nations has not been convinced as a result of the resolution that the members of the Security Council have not yet passed.

I would like to speak for a moment in defence of the United Nations. There are some who are suggesting that this is not the United Nations' finest hour and in fact that it is becoming weak and irrelevant. I have to totally disagree with that.

As Winston Churchill said, democracy is a terrible form of government, but it is the best we have. In the same sense the United Nations is not perfect. It has made some dramatic mistakes in the past, but it has also done a tremendous amount of good. We should never stop trying to improve the United Nations. For example, people specifically refer to the Security Council with the veto of five members, which is why I am happy that Canada left its options open to the very last moment.

Had any of those five nations that have a veto exercised that veto in an unreasonable way, that would have dictated Canada's foreign policy. As I said earlier, Canada is always going to make its own decisions. We are not going to leave it up to other nations.

During this whole debate the United Nations has been at the forefront. The issue has been discussed day in and day out. The United States has been going to the United Nations. All the nations have been looking to it. The media over the last months and years have been focused around the United Nations. It has been the centre of activity to try to find a solution to a very difficult problem. If some nations act before the United Nations does, it does not mean the United Nations has failed. It means that those nations have made other decisions than what the United Nations has made.

The United Nations is made up of the member nations of the world. Those member nations in the United Nations have not been convinced that there is enough evidence and enough reason to embark on military force at this time.

Another reason for my own personal decision is related to innocent civilians in Iraq and innocent civilians and soldiers in neighbouring countries. I do not think anyone would argue the fact that Iraq would be a better place without Saddam Hussein, but exactly how does one do that? What does one do when the troops are surrounding Baghdad, a city full of millions of innocent people? How does one cause a change of a few people who are holding that horrendous dictatorial regime in place without the murder of many more innocent people?

Some of the other reasons upon which I based my decision relate to the ramifications of this, because it is not simply an attack on one palace, one country, or even one region. There are ramifications for the hundreds of millions of Muslims in the many Arab nations. The very complex interaction of religions and politics will have a much wider effect on the world and we have to view that effect. Simply, the fact is that going to war has a tremendous economic impact on all those nations. How many poor people will die in all the countries involved in a war, including the United States, because of lack of funds to feed the poor or fund health care systems?

A war will also, in my opinion, weaken the war on terrorism. The war on terrorism, that the Minister of Foreign Affairs so eloquently outlined today in which we are hand in hand fighting with the United States, is far from won. The terrorists we are fighting are not armies in specific regions; they are people who live in the apartment next door. They are very hard to detect. The goodwill and efforts of many nations around the world are needed to defeat them because they proliferate in virtually every nation on earth.

Some of the nations that are on our side, that are our allies right now, are helping us root out the terrorists. However, they are in very tenuous situations and on the verge of threat from fundamentalists. As I said earlier when talking about the history of the Arab Muslim world, they could be easily aroused by more incursions of the west.

If there is not sufficient rationale this could simply antagonize those people and give enough force to the fundamentalists trying to destabilize those governments. It could cause an overthrow in many nations that we depend on in the fight against terrorism. That would leave those nations as protectorates of the cells of terrorism where they could brainwash, train, arm and equip those small groups of people who live in that apartment next door to set off bombs and commit other terrorist activities in areas where peaceful families live, such as in North America.

Other reasons for my personal decision are the discussions I had with ambassadors or people knowing their positions in all the countries around Iraq.

Some countries, as members know, such as Iran and Kuwait, have been attacked by Iraq. These countries, out of them all, should be the most fearful of Iraq and its potential for weapons of mass destruction, especially since Iraq's missiles at the moment are very short range and can go no farther than the adjacent countries.

Not one of the ambassadors with whom I discussed this felt that military action was an appropriate solution to the situation at this time. If the people who are most threatened and who are the closest do not feel this is the way to solve the problem of Saddam Hussein, then Canada, a large ocean away, cannot see this as a clear and present danger.

When we upset a regime it is not simple to replace it with a perfect, or democratic, or better regime. One person does not stay in power in a country on his or her own. There must be support for the person. It is very complex to rebuild a nation, especially one with so many forces.

Iraq was never a unified country in the first place. What happens with a destabilization of the system and the collaboration of the Shi'ites in southern Iraq and in Iran? What happens with the tensions of the Kurds in northern Iraq and Turkey? What happens in the very scary situation of Israel and Palestine which many people believe have caused much of the dissent in the Middle East and many of the terror attacks that have resulted in the murder of people?

In the veil of a war against Iraq, what could happen in the Palestine-Israeli conflict? More individuals could be killed under the veil of this other threat and people would not even notice it. It could also accelerate to an extent that Israel gets involved in the complex inter-relationship. All sorts of nations are involved now in a horrendous conflict. It has spread far beyond the borders of removing one dictator.

This should be a happy day. We have made a sovereign decision that will make many Canadians happy. Without another United Nations resolution we will not participate in this particular war. However, innocent people will continue to die in Iraq while this regime is still in place and innocent people will die when this regime is removed. It is not a happy day in that respect.

What we need to do now is to look for solutions to remove all the causes of violence in the Middle East so that things like this will not occur in the future and that terrorism, which we are also fighting at this time, will not occur in the future.

We need to intensify our efforts to support education in the area. We need to intensify our humanitarian support. We need to work on the belief that we have, both at home and abroad in those nations, for religious tolerance and understanding, an understanding of the history that the people in those nations have been through.

We need to help build a world where the people in those countries can regain the pride they have lost, the pride in their citizenship that will allow them to stand up and create governments for which they can be proud.

If we do all of that, we will improve the lives of people in those areas and the world will be a better place for all of us, especially a world that is so connected that if something happens it happens to all of us.

As John Donne, a famous British parliamentarian and poet, said, which describes any deaths, any unrest or any unhappiness that occurs in the area, in referring to each of us:

Ask not for whom the bell tolls,It tolls for thee.

Situation in IraqEmergency Debate

11:45 p.m.

Canadian Alliance

Jason Kenney Canadian Alliance Calgary Southeast, AB

Mr. Speaker, I am not pleased to rise to debate this matter. I do not think any of us are pleased that this matter has come before the world and our Parliament.

I am particularly displeased with the form in which debate occurs in this place and the lack of seriousness with which the government treats it. I compare unfavourably the nature of the cabinet's regard for Parliament in this critical matter with that exemplified in the mother Parliament at Westminster where, over the past months, the senior members of the Queen's ministry have appeared repeatedly before a full and anxious House of Commons to report in detail on the progress, or lack thereof, of diplomacy as it relates to the situation in Iraq.

The right hon. Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, the foreign secretary and the defence minister, week after week, appeared before a fully active and deeply interested House of Commons offering detailed statements on positions of the British government and opening the House to extended periods of question and debate where thoughtful and informed positions were being taken on all sides of that House. I compare that unfavourably with this place here tonight where--and I will not mention the absence or presence of members--senior members of the ministry have not even deigned to come before the House and explain in any detail the position of the government, why and how it arrived at that position, what it regards as the consequences of that position for Canada's standing in the world, for our bilateral relations with the United States and for the benighted people of Iraq. We have no opportunity to have an extended and meaningful discussion on any of those points.

Instead, today, after months of prevarication and constant efforts to sit firmly on the fence, the Prime Minister finally revealed a position on the part of his government in the form of a 35 second statement read out during question period.

Just at the outset, I am normally not preoccupied by matters of process but I want to place firmly on the record my great disappointment with the lack of gravity with which this matter has been treated by the government in Parliament.

I am further disappointed and I would say, frankly, ashamed, although I do not often say that, bit I am ashamed in some ways to be a Canadian today, to live in a country with a government, in one of the great moments of statecraft and on one of the great and most important questions of international security at the beginning of this century, that has decided to cop out, and has decided that indifference and inaction constitute an adequate response in the face of a gross, ongoing and dangerous violation of international law, a brooding threat to international security and a monstrous violation of international human rights standards, which is the fascist regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

Let us briefly review, as I know others have, the history of this matter as it relates in particular to the United Nations, because it is on that and its authority that the Prime Minister apparently has finally established some sort of position.

In 1990 Iraq illegally and aggressively invaded its peaceful and neighbouring country of Kuwait. The United Nations responded with resolutions 678, 686, 687 and 688 in which it required immediate Iraqi removal from the sovereign state of Kuwait. Of course the Security Council in those resolutions authorized with virtual unanimity, Yemen being the sole no vote, a military action of that nature.

Iraq was removed by force, which is characteristic of the only means which Saddam Hussein seems to understand, and the United Nations gave him, in a ceasefire agreement which was ratified by UNSCR 687, a 15 day timeline to report and destroy all of his illegal weapons in his armament of mass destruction. At the time when this undertaking was given by him, not simply demanded by the international community but given by him as condition precedent for the cessation of hostile activities, which had been authorized by the Security Council, the international community in fact had no idea about the depth and breadth of the illegal Iraqi arsenal. In many respects, we still were innocent to the depth of the horror his regime had represented for his people for the two preceding decades.

So the UN placed this obligation on him and he accepted in an undertaking, in a ceasefire to illegal military action, which he had commenced through an act of aggression, 15 days to disarm. Today we are 4,300 days later. It is 12 years since that undertaking in a ceasefire agreement for a 15 day period of disarmament.

We are 4,300 days and 16 United Nations Security Council resolutions later, most of them unanimous, 4,300 days and countless efforts at diplomatic resolutions, 4,300 days during which time, as we know, UNSCOM inspectors generally were unsuccessful at finding illegal Iraqi arsenals unless and until there were defectors who left that fascist regime, such as Saddam Hussein's son-in-law in 1995, to report on the illegal weapons that were being hidden. We are 4,300 days later and during that time the IAEA declared in the mid-1990s that Iraq had no discernable nuclear weapons program until Saddam Hussein's son-in-law defected and reported that indeed there was one. He returned, of course, and was fed to wild and rabid dogs in an act of brutality typical of that dictator.

Then we returned with another set of UN weapons inspectors in UNSCOM in the late 1980s. The Iraqi regime again refused and failed to cooperate, so the civilized world again threatened force, which was manifested in Operation Desert Fox, supported by the Liberal government, I might add, without explicit UN authorization. Then the world went back to its holiday from history and wanted to believe that containment, an occasional military action, and a brutal sanctions regime which has caused the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were adequate policies to face a dangerous, hostile dictator in violation of countless UN resolutions, in violation of the express will of the international community. That has been the policy of this and other governments, roughly since Operation Desert Fox of 1998.

However, some of our allies, foremost among them, of course, the United States and the United Kingdom, realized that on September 11, 2001, our holiday from history ended. They realized that there are forces of evil, yes, a word which I know that in the politically correct lexicon of modern liberalism one is not permitted to utter, but evil nevertheless. People dedicated to destruction, dedicated to killing innocent civilians, indeed, dedicated to the downfall of all of western civilization and liberal democracy, unleashed untold violence against civilians simply because they were Americans or lived in the United States.

It dawned on the world's leaders clearly that the prospect of marrying that kind of Islamo-fascist terrorist violence with weapons of mass destruction created and fed by rogue regimes, weapons having no return address, for which deterrence and containment do not suffice as a policy of control, that such weapons falling into the hands of violent terrorists would inevitably be used in a mass way against civilian populations in the western world.

The United States learned that lesson clearly, understanding the implications of September 11. The United Kingdom, standing up to its historic tradition of responsibility in enforcing international law, understood that clearly. Australia came to understand the threat posed by the marriage of this new rabid form of terrorism with weapons of mass destruction when it lost 200 civilians at Bali months ago. But for some reason, Canada seems not yet to have learned this new lesson from the new history of the 21st century.

The Prime Minister will argue, and apparently has, that military action about to be undertaken by our traditional and historic allies lies somehow outside the ambit of international law. I say nonsense, and I refer to nothing less than himself as an authority.

Let me go through his record. In this place in 1990, when UN Security Council resolutions had overwhelmingly been adopted, authorizing the use of force to expel Saddam's army from Kuwait, the then leader of the opposition and current Prime Minister stood in this place and opposed the UN-sanctioned use of force to ensure international peace and security. He opposed the UN mandate at that time.

Eventually, when he saw that public opinion was running in favour of force rather than appeasement in the face of an aggressive dictator's invasion, he modified his position to say that while he was not opposed to the use of force, he did not want Canada to contribute to it. While he was not opposed to the placement of Canadian Forces in that region, he did not want them to actually be engaged in military activity. That was the respect he showed for the United Nations resolutions at that time.

Then let us fast forward to, as I mentioned earlier, Operation Desert Fox, where the United States and the United Kingdom realized that Saddam was not cooperating with the UNSCOM regime in the mid-1990s and threatened military action. The Prime Minister at the time stood in this place and categorically--

Situation in IraqEmergency Debate

Midnight

The Speaker

I hesitate to interrupt the hon. member for Calgary Southeast in full flight, but it being midnight, the debate has come to an end and I have to declare the motion to adjourn the House carried. Accordingly, despite my reluctance in interrupting the hon. member, this House stands adjourned until tomorrow at 10 a.m. pursuant to Standing Order 24(1).

(The House adjourned at 12 a.m.)