Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Ms. McDonough just finished taking a shot at you for talking about the evacuation and self-congratulations. I'd remind Ms. McDonough that the reason we are here at this committee is because Madame Lalonde asked us to come and discuss just that.
In her letter asking the committee to meet, she wrote:
“First, it should evaluate the concrete results of measures taken by the Canadian government to evacuate Quebec and Canadian nationals from Lebanon.”
That's why we're here, so the minister was quite right to be discussing that. I suppose it has been such a success that there's a desire to change the subject.
Mr. Patry did so, and he referenced Suez 1956 as the height of Canadian foreign policy.
In 1956 Canada was not neutral; Canada took a very clear side. The Liberal Prime Minister of the day, Louis St. Laurent, was in lockstep with the Republican U.S. President, Dwight Eisenhower. They took a clear side, and by taking a clear, principled stand, we were able to be honest brokers in the creation of peacekeeping, which arose later out of that conflict. So it's not in the Canadian tradition to be neutral, even when we were creating peacemaking.
I'm very concerned and troubled by what I hear from the Bloc and from the NDP, in particular, about the suggestion that there's some moral equivalency between the parties here. Hezbollah is a listed terrorist group under Canadian law. That happened under the Liberal government. Why? They were party to a series of kidnappings of westerners in Lebanon in the 1980s. We all remember the suicide truck bombing that killed 200 Americans in the barracks in Beirut. Some of us remember the 1985 hijacking of TWA flight 847—that's the one where a gun was held to the head of the pilot out the window. This is a terrorist group. There were major attacks outside of Lebanon, in Argentina on the Israeli embassy. About 29 were killed there, and I think there were 95 killed at a Jewish community centre.
Jan Egeland, the UN humanitarian top guy in Lebanon, has talked about their use of civilians—women and children—as human shields in the current conflict, and how they take pride in those casualities as a way of helping their promotion. This is a terrorist group.
I simply ask the minister, is it in Canada's tradition to be neutral between such a terrorist group and a sovereign democracy?