Borys Wrzesnewskyj

[Darfur, May 1st, 2006]

Mr. Chair, I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Mount Royal.

The present day hell of Darfur has its roots in the competition for scarce resources in the region. African farmers and nomadic Arab herders have been vying for what little sustenance the land can provide, and the creeping desertification of Darfur has exacerbated this competition. The Arab Islamic government has ignored threadbare Darfur's needs for decades.

In February 2003 Darfur insurgents attacked several army outposts to draw attention to their demands. Senior military officials in Khartoum, feeling emasculated by their failure to win the civil war with Sudan's Christian south, reacted in Darfur with ferocity. Villages were bombed from the air as Janjaweed militiamen moved in to rape, pillage, burn and murder. This hurricane of hatred led to more than 10,000 Darfurians dying every month for almost two years. The genocide had begun.

The fighting subsided when the African Union brokered ceasefire negotiations between Khartoum and the two main insurgent groups. On May 12, 2005, to alleviate the continuing suffering of the displaced in Darfur and to assist the work of the African Union peacekeepers, AMIS, the former Prime Minister dedicated $192 million to the region. It could not have come at a better time.

In late September 2005, I travelled to Khartoum and then to Darfur on a self-financed fact-finding mission.

In Darfur, as I listened to our soldiers, I grew increasingly proud of our military's conduct under extremely difficult circumstances. The direct consequences of Canada's military commitment to Darfur, the empowering of AMIS, is saving thousands of civilian lives weekly. While in Darfur, I was able to verify that attacks were coordinated by Janjaweed and Sudanese army forces. This knowledge was based on identification cards left behind after an attack. I had an opportunity to see the identity cards in question and these clearly established that the Janjaweed were in fact irregular Sudanese government forces.

Meanwhile, in the internally displaced refugee camps, the NGO community has been doing a phenomenal job. I found the people in the camps generally in good spirits. There were wells, schools and hospitals.

However, phase one of our involvement is only sufficient to protect the refugee camps and the areas around them. For the two million refugees to return to their destroyed ancestral villages, phase two will be required.

Phase two will not happen without the international community, the United Nations and Canada, stepping up to the plate to expand the peacemaking capability to encompass not only the refugee camps but the countryside from which the refugees were ethnically cleansed. All of us know that the solution is not for refugee camps to become a permanent fixture.

In phase two, the hell of today's Darfur will be solved on three levels: humanitarian, military and political. Although interconnected, each will require different tools. Humanitarian aid must continue to arrive. We cannot allow the beginnings of a genocide by a hurricane of hatred to transform into a planned starvation, genocide by attrition. Militarily, what is needed today is a 20,000 person strong UN peacemaking military force with a mandate to shoot back, and a no-fly zone.

Finally, along with our responsibility to protect, there should be a responsibility to rebuild. Politically, the AU sponsored peace talks must continue. Due to the political realities of Sudan, these talks may last as long as three to six years. Along with the talks, an international donors conference is needed to commit the resources to rebuild Darfur, a conference that would commit resources to build a civil society, the social, political and economic rebuilding of Darfur over the next decade.

While I was in El Fasher, Darfur, I visited a local hospital. As I stood in the hospital looking at the blood-soaked cots, I had a feeling of foreboding. The two Darfurian insurgent groups had splintered. While the refugees in the camps were mostly secure, an increasingly disparate number of armed groups in the countryside were filling the security vacuum. Concurrently, the Sudanese army and Janjaweed were attacking villages.

For once, let the rallying cry “Never Again” be a commitment of substance, not rhetoric.

[Citizenship and Immigration, May 1st, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, obviously someone was not listening carefully. Enough excuses and obstinacy from the Conservatives. The rules allow for ministerial discretion.

The member for Medicine Hat is the minister. The buck stops with him. Instead of guarding our borders against terrorist cells, our officers are now terrorizing hard-working would-be Canadian citizens by nabbing their children in schools and jailing them in detention centres. Two of the children, Kimberly and Gerald, are in Ottawa today.

On humanitarian grounds, why will the minister not show compassion, good judgment and do the right thing by immediately issuing a work permit?

[Citizenship and Immigration, May 1st, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, my Canada is not one in which law enforcement officers intimidate school teachers, nab children from class as bait and then put them in a detention centre. Canadians expected that tough on crime meant going after guns, gangs and drug dealers.

Will the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration use his ministerial discretion and issue a work permit for Mr. Lizano and allow the process of landing his family to begin. Mr. Lizano is a hard-working construction foreman whose youngest child is Canadian and his other children, Kimberley and Gerald, are A students. They are exactly the kinds of immigrants Canada wants.

[Petitions, April 26th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to Standing Order 36, I have the honour of presenting a petition signed by over 340 constituents from my riding of Etobicoke Centre. The petitioners express ongoing concerns about the immense challenges the people of Somalia face in rebuilding a civil society and they are urging the Canadian government to appoint a special envoy to Somalia. With Somalia in the grips of a terrible drought, my constituents are calling on the Canadian government to do everything it can to help relieve the suffering in that country. A famine's death march does not wait.

[Chernobyl, April 26th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, 20 years ago Chernobyl ignited. The radiation released was 400 times greater than in Hiroshima.

Following the explosion, the communist elites of the Soviet Union secretly removed their families from nearby Kiev and Minsk. Meanwhile, the children of those cities marched in obligatory May Day parades celebrating the grand achievements of communism. In those sun-drenched days as crowds watched and the children marched, within the sun's warm rays hid a terrible fate.

In the years that followed, doctors in Kiev have explained to me that they were instructed not to register stillbirths so as to falsify statistics. I have listened to young women too fearful of bearing new life in this world because their bodies are poisoned. I have held the hands of children, bodies twisted by the radiation.

How many have died? Is it 6,000 or 60,000? Can we quantify the human agony? We cannot, but we can remember and take stock of humanity's failings.

[RESUMPTION OF DEBATE ON ADDRESS IN REPLY, April 24th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, today is an unofficial day of mourning. Four young Canadians offered up the ultimate sacrifice, their very lives, to bring hope to the people of Afghanistan. One of those soldiers was from Toronto. As a sign of respect to the soldiers and their families, the Mayor of Toronto has lowered flags to half-mast. Yet in Ottawa on our Peace Tower our flag remains at full-mast.

Quite correctly, every November 11 we lower flags to half-mast to respect all fallen soldiers through the ages, but what callous intransigence has led to the decision not to respect those who have given their lives so recently?

[RESUMPTION OF DEBATE ON ADDRESS IN REPLY, April 24th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I will answer the member's question in two parts.

First, on the issue of commitment, unfortunately our commitment has slid. At the same time, there is a great deal of confusion. Some people talk about our Afghani mission as being a peacekeeping mission but quite clearly it is not.

Can it be justified? Is it a military mission, a just war? I believe that argument can be made but we need to establish clear parameters. What is peace-building? What is peacekeeping? In regard to peacekeeping, the rules were quite clear. Peace negotiations are taking place between the warring sides. A truce has been established. There is a physical buffer between the two warring sides and that buffer is filled by peacekeepers.

Regarding peace-building in Haiti, it seems that our soldiers have taken on the role of a constabulary. Then there is the danger of using soldiers, who were trained as warriors, as peacekeepers. We saw what happened in Somalia.

As the concept evolves and expands into different areas, peace-building and peacemaking, the peacekeeping role should be split off into a separate ministry, a ministry of peace. People trained as peacekeepers use very different equipment than soldiers use in war. I believe that by establishing this sort of ministry we will once again establish a leading role of being a vehicle for peace internationally.

The second question was regarding militarization of aid. We often find a lack of coordination between NGOs, and the tremendous work that they do, with peacekeepers, peacemakers or peace-builders, and not just in Afghanistan. Having had the opportunity to visit Darfur I believe it is incredibly important to have this ministry of peace that would coordinate with our ministry of defence. However we should establish what that ministry would do. Would it be a ministry of defence or just a war ministry? We need to have coordination between that particular role and the role of rebuilding and building democratic civil societies.

[RESUMPTION OF DEBATE ON ADDRESS IN REPLY, April 24th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Etobicoke North.

I would like to congratulate you on your re-election, Mr. Speaker, and also take this opportunity to thank the people of Etobicoke Centre for the honour of being elected twice in the last year and a half to represent them in the House of Commons. Both times I have been elected by overwhelming electoral margins, which means that my obligations to the people of Etobicoke Centre are that much greater and that I will work on their behalf that much harder. What I bring to the House of Commons from Etobicoke Centre are my constituents' values of hard work, integrity and generosity of spirit.

This past weekend was Easter weekend for my family, as it was for most Ukrainian Canadians as well as those of the Orthodox faith. For this reason, I would like to begin my response to the Speech from the Throne with a quotation from the Bible and one of topics of discussion during this past Easter weekend: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God”.

This past weekend, four Canadian lives were extinguished half a world away. These Canadians volunteered and left the safety and warmth of their families' hearths to travel to the dangerous and desolate mountains of Afghanistan. They went there to bring peace to a part of the world where evil continues to breed in caves, where the men of hate, the Taliban, gather in order to sow the seeds of death, and where, in vast cultivated fields of poppies, the destruction of millions of lives grows.

There is no doubt that these four Canadian soldiers whose lives were extinguished believed that they were fighting a just war, that they were in fact peacemakers. For this ultimate of sacrifices, Corporals Matthew Dinning and Randy Payne, Lieutenant William Turner, and Bombardier Myles Mansell will be remembered as “the sons of God”.

The throne speech touched only briefly on Canada's international role, stating that “Canada's voice in the world must be supported by action”, that we will support our “core values of freedom, democracy, the rule of law and human rights”, and finally, that our policies will be “infused with growing confidence that...[we] can make a difference”.

Unfortunately, the throne speech did not address either a vision or the “how” of our engagement with the world when it comes to supporting these, our core values. True leadership entails a vision and action within the framework of this vision. I will take this opportunity to speak to a vision and a framework on how we as a country can and should engage the world outside of our trade relationships.

Canada's international role has evolved over the last 139 years. For a good portion of our history, we were viewed as a junior partner in the international interventions of imperial powers with which we have been allied. Whether it was the United Kingdom or the United States, or the Boer or Korean wars, Canada could be counted on to send its men and women to wage war alongside our allies. We were also members of grand coalitions during the two world wars.

Finally, half a century ago, a Canadian diplomat, Lester B. Pearson, envisioned a new and groundbreaking role for Canada's soldiers. He envisioned that young Canadian men and women would travel to conflict zones throughout the world not to wage war, but to serve as peacekeepers. This novel approach was a major paradigm shift in how Canada saw itself engaging the world. It earned Lester B. Pearson the Nobel peace prize and established for Canada a tradition of peacekeeping.

Today, using soldiers for peace has evolved and expanded to include peacemaking, as we call our Afghani mission, peacekeeping, as we have done for decades in places such as Cyprus, and peace-building, as we are doing in Haiti.

However, today it is not just Canadian soldiers who are emissaries of peace. Today there are more Canadian civilians volunteering abroad, as humanitarians and civil society builders with non-governmental organizations, than there are Canadian soldiers.

Peacemaking, peacekeeping, peace-building, civil society architects and good governance: it is difficulty to understand exactly what these terms entail. When does a soldier become a peacemaker? Does he or she take on a constabulary role in Haiti or civil society building in Afghanistan? How do we guarantee that we do not again make the mistake of using as peacekeepers soldiers trained in the specialities of war, such as the airborne regiment in Somalia?

For Canadians to build on our half-century tradition of peacekeeping and to once again show international leadership, let us establish a clear framework for how we engage in countries where major conflicts or fundamental transitions are taking place.

Let us imagine our Ministry of Defence becoming a ministry of just wars with unambiguous obligations and regulations outlining under which circumstances we would engage in war. In the situation of territorial defence, the case is clear. In the case of war to counter threats to our peace, the threats must be clearly verified and acknowledged by international agencies. In the case of R2P, the responsibility to protect outside of situations of genocide, which require immediate action, it should also include a clear responsibility to rebuild.

Finally, let Canada become the first country in the world to establish a ministry of peace, a ministry which would include peacekeepers, humanitarians, democratic and civil society builders, a ministry with an organizational structure similar to our armed forces that would sign up volunteers for multi-year contracts with a choice of fields of specialization: peacekeeping, humanitarian aid and democratic civil society building.

In any given year there are at least a dozen countries in the world where major conflicts or fundamental transitions take place. Quite often in Canada we have large diaspora communities from several of these countries. Not only do our multicultural communities have linguistic and intimate cultural knowledge but they also have emotional ties to their ancestral homelands. This uniquely Canadian reservoir of human potential can be tapped into to help in the processes of conflict resolution and civil society building.

If properly executed, Canada can establish for itself, through our ministry of peace, an international role as an honest broker which will resolve conflicts and rebuild society without the countries affected fearing a loss of sovereignty or control of national resources.

Having played a positive role during historic transitions, Canada will have established goodwill and trust among the peoples of these countries and their political leadership. Let us give peace a chance.

Today, unfortunately, is an unofficial day of mourning. It comes just days after Easter when we meditated on the selfless sacrifice of oneself in the battle against evil; the concept that through death comes rebirth. Four young Canadians have offered up the ultimate sacrifice, their very lives, to bring hope into the lives of strangers and those not yet born in a country far from home.

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God”. Let us envision and build a Canada that will be blessed, for it will be known as a nation of peacemakers, a nation of God.

[Resumption of debate on Address in Reply, April 11th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I notice the throne speech states that the government would, “ensure that the Senate better reflects both the democratic values of Canadians”.

Does the hon. member opposite believe that the definition of “Senate democratic values and reforms” means naming a campaign co-chair bagman to the Senate?

[Petitions, April 11th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to Standing Order 36, I have the pleasure to present a petition signed by some 30 people from my riding of Etobicoke Centre.

The petitioners are deeply worried about the ongoing challenges faced by Somalia in nurturing civil society and are calling upon the Canadian government to appoint a special envoy to Somalia. As well, Somalia is in the grips of a major drought and my constituents are urging the Canadian government to step up to the plate in this time of need. A famine's death march does not wait.