Madam Speaker, the question still remains. What is Canada's position on the negotiation of a nuclear weapons convention, a convention that would ban outright nuclear weapons?
We have done this before. We have done it in terms of a chemical weapons convention. We have done it in terms of a biological weapons convention. Both of those conventions presented significant challenges. Both of them saw other measures taken before the conventions were adopted. However, we still managed, as an international community, through multilateral negotiations, to come up with conventions that banned both chemical and biological weapons outright.
Sadly, we are not taking the same path toward banning nuclear weapons. We know that there are over 23,000 nuclear weapons on our planet today and that those constitute a significant threat to human life, that they can result in, as the NPT conference talked about, catastrophic human consequences.
The only way to secure human safety and security is to find a way to ban outright all of those nuclear weapons.
Sadly, it appears that Canada is not willing to play a role in that process. Canada could be a leader in all of this and yet it has not endorsed the secretary-general's five-point plan and it has not endorsed the model treaty that is currently in circulation. Canada could do more.