Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the members for Brampton West and Scarborough—Rouge River.
I rise in this chamber a little reluctantly because I know there are expectant eyes on us today. What I wanted to stay here for and hear the debate was mainly to respond to them and to some of the faces I saw campaigning and knocking on doors in my riding and what happened from time to time when someone would say that I had to do something about what was going on in Sri Lanka. Someone would explain some part of something that was very difficult to comprehend in terms of what was happening to a member of an immediate family.
We stand in this chamber saying that we are having an emergency debate and I cannot imagine what the people who have experienced what has been going on Sri Lanka for months or years in terms of the most recent conflict but for years in terms of the turmoil must be thinking it takes to define an emergency for the hon. members of the House and how sincere this debate is tonight in that respect.
The test for us certainly has to be that an emergency debate covers an emergency that touches Canadian principles of when we should start to be very concerned. I do not have the knowledge that some of the other people do of the situation on the ground but I can tell the House that Canadian principles would say that we should have had an emergency debate long before tonight.
What I say to that is not to celebrate some kind of superiority in contrast to that of the government but to reflect to the people whose eyes are on us tonight how much work we need to do to be better as Canadians.
We used to have a reflex to be among the first people to understand when there was a meaningful intervention to be made. It was made by people in this chamber, some of whom still have seats here, with much more urgency and much more effectiveness, working with bands of nations and not for show, not to make people feel comfortable that their voices were finally reflected here, but actually to get something done.
I say to people tonight that we need to do better. We need to have some sense of the good fortune that we have here. I say to some of the eyes that are upon us, it is not reasonable to expect that this chamber, the parties in it and the members in it, can take sides per se. Nor can we say to the considerable Tamil community in Canada that we want anyone here to take sides in the sense of being part of conflicts. Conflicts cannot come to Canada.
However, what can come here and what every citizen is entitled to with the same respect as any other, no matter when they joined our population, is a sharpened sense on the part of Canada of understanding where those needs are.
We have the population to inform us, to make us sophisticated, to make us capable of intervening and understanding far ahead of most of the nations on earth and we failed that test. It is right for the members of that community, on that basis as Canadian citizens, to come here looking for redress, looking for some real answers in what is going forward, looking for, yes, as people have said, more by way of aid but hopefully something different than that.
For those people who might be observing this debate and wondering what this has to so with conditions in Canada, I can assure them that we would not be having this debate here tonight if things did not happen in terms of 9/11, in terms of the reactions of our country to the threat and real fear that people started to feel. What that did was change some of the terms under which we injected ourselves into international dialogue and debate. It made us, without judgment of the people opposite, more conservative.
We made a mistake. We loss touch with our Canadian citizenry. We had a character test and we did not do well because we took a gross generality that somehow every liberation group, everybody rising up, we should stand back and watch them be attacked with military force.
A previous generation of Canadians thought differently. Lester Pearson thought differently. Other Canadians increasingly found ways to be imaginative, to be creative and to find solutions. Some Canadians with seats in this House have tried that. We need to try more. We need to be in dialogue with Canadians. They need to understand our principles of peace, of intervention, of creativity and of working multilaterally that can be put to work to find solutions.
The people whose eyes are on us tonight should expect us not just to finish this debate but to move forward with some kind of new purpose and intention, with some of the horror and some of the difficulty people have experienced translated into something better in terms of the exercise of Canadian principles. They have a right to expect that. I look forward to contributing.