Foreign Affairs committee  As you know, the history of Canada with India and the Indian nuclear program is very, very important. Canadian technology is used to produce the materials for its nuclear program. This gives Canada an important moral obligation, but I think it also adds to the importance that oth

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you. First, briefly on where Canada stands, I think it's important to remember that we have a very long tradition of clear commitment to the elimination of nuclear weapons. I want to pay tribute to Canadian officials who pursue that objective with great skill and determina

Foreign Affairs committee  We need a new institutional arrangement for India. The objective is to bring India, Pakistan, and Israel into the NPT as non-nuclear-weapon states. That's not going to happen immediately, but we should not go the other direction and simply recognize them as nuclear states without

Foreign Affairs committee  You mentioned the Russian missile test, and that's reflective of the action-reaction cycle of nuclear arms. In the early nineties and throughout the nineties we were in a situation of action-reaction in a downward spiral, and there was then a complementary action to reduce nucle

Foreign Affairs committee  I would just add, very briefly, that I was encouraged by your point that you do not support the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and so that's the challenge we hold in common. How do we make good on that concern? We can't turn the clock back, but we can control the science. We

Foreign Affairs committee  Well, as we were saying, in order to prevent the wide distribution of technology that has quite immediate weapons applications, the proposal is to place the sensitive technology, such as uranium enrichment and the reprocessing of fuel, into multilateral hands, into international

Foreign Affairs committee  Briefly, it is a dangerous situation, and we've been reading about the numbers of states in the Middle East that have declared their intention to pursue nuclear power: Jordan, quite actively; Saudi Arabia; and some of the gulf states. Unfortunately, I think part of that interest

Foreign Affairs committee  Briefly, I think the practicality of predicting an outcome is not great, but Canada's commitment to NATO is not in doubt. It's not ambiguous, and I think it's in a strong position to keep raising the question. It can't be done unilaterally by Canada; you have to do it together wi

Foreign Affairs committee  Very briefly, it is to second what Mr. Roche has said, but also to say that because there are various issues that come up, I think it's fundamentally important that Canada have the fundamentals absolutely correct and on record. The Prime Minister spoke at the General Assembly of

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, for the opportunity to be here. I'm pleased to address the committee on behalf of both Project Ploughshares and Veterans Against Nuclear Arms. We've produced a longer paper on the subject of our disarmament agenda for Canada, and I'll see to i

Foreign Affairs committee  I will say one thing, and that is that we really need to exercise caution when we make the Afghanistan mission about NATO and about what's good for NATO. It's what's good for Afghanistan. I know that Professor Bercuson isn't ignoring that, but shifting the emphasis to saying that

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you. I think the point you're referring to about the envoy Mr. Brahimi's comment about the failure to speak to the Taliban raises what the fundamental situation is there. Is the fundamental situation there a government that has basic support over all the country and is b

Foreign Affairs committee  I'm in some agreement with Professor Bercuson. This is the point I was really making in response to the earlier question. It's a caricature to say we should talk to the Taliban and negotiate going back to the.... There's a broad range of dissidents, and as Professor Bercuson has

Foreign Affairs committee  I will briefly. A great tragedy will unfold if the insurgency in the south acts as a magnet and increasingly draws security forces into that vortex, and as a result, other parts of the country grow gradually less protected and less secure, and the reconstruction, which had a chan

Foreign Affairs committee  First, in response to who to negotiate with, one of the characteristics of the insurgency is that it is most intensive in an area that is ethnically and geographically defined. It's not divorced from particular populations and from a particular geographical region where it's conc