Thanks very much, Mr. Chair.
I want to try to change the conversation a bit, because I am concerned that we're doing a study on Canada's role in NATO and that we tend to go down the rabbit hole of ballistic missile defence, which to me is generals fighting the last non-war, when we have other concerns that are quite pressing. So I'm going to stay away from that. Everybody knows my position on that, that we ought not to participate in something that's expensive and does not work.
My second concern is that there has been a lot of discussion about Canada as a loyal ally of the United States, presuming that's our role in NATO, when traditionally we've had a quite different role in NATO, which is to pursue the objectives of NATO through somewhat different policies than the United States.
What I would like to turn and talk about, and I'm primarily going to talk to Mr. Hobbs about this, is the NATO Parliamentary Assembly and its activities on disarmament. The reason I ask is that I haven't seen as much as I would like to see, and I take some of the responsibility. I'm not the active participant from my party there; it is another member of Parliament.
We had the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly in 2016 do the Tbilisi Declaration, which pointed out that there was a real need for de-alerting of nuclear forces when we have 1,600 U.S. and Russian missiles on launch-on-warning status, very dangerous in the current levels of tension. In that declaration, they talked about the start of multilateral negotiations for nuclear disarmament.
I'm asking, first, just a general question about the parliamentary assembly. It doesn't have a disarmament committee, so what other activities have there been in the parliamentary assembly on the disarmament or nuclear de-escalation front?