Mr. Speaker, I represent the constituency of Kitchener, an urban southwestern Ontario riding that possesses, like Canada itself, a diversity of industry and people.
Like so many constituencies in this country it has been profoundly affected by events in Bosnia, the former Yugoslavia, today and was affected also in the past. In the summer of 1914 a shot was fired in Sarajevo and World War I began. Two years later in 1916 Berlin, Ontario, which was called Canada's German capital became Kitchener and Kitchener changed profoundly after that date. After 1945 Kitchener riding received thousands of immigrants and refugees from what was Yugoslavia.
I take these examples to illustrate that nearly all Canadians were affected by those two terrible wars and those two terrible wars were concentrated in the area where we are looking at such carnage today.
I think everyone in Canada took the same lesson from World War I or World War II and that was the notion that Canada's foreign and defence policy should have as its fundamental principle the notion that its national interest was best served by the construction of an international order based on law and strong multilateral institutions.
From that commitment came Canada's major contribution to the world after 1945. This period which is known as Canada's golden age of diplomacy was marked by a strong Canadian commitment to the United Nations, and a belief that the cold war had created a special middle power role for Canada. Of course the best example of this was the role of Lester Pearson in the Suez crisis of 1956.
It is often said that Pearson invented peacekeeping in 1956 but I think it is more properly said that he codified the procedures of peacemaking. The concept was simple and has been extraordinarily useful not simply for Canada and the United Nations but for the interests of world security.
It was held by Pearson at that point that the UN should use the armed forces of nations that were not major powers and those nations should supervise peace settlements. Furthermore such supervision should be carried out with the consent of and through continuous negotiations with the parties in the dispute. This was a central character of peacemaking as it was defined in 1956-1957.
In fact Pearson was disappointed with the outcome of the negotiations in 1956 because there were limits on what Israel
and Egypt would accept. He had wanted more carefully defined terms and conditions but he was unable to convince others, including the Secretary General at the time, that these arguments had validity.
Ten years later, however, in 1967 we saw the validity of his arguments when the United Nations emergency force was forced to withdraw when the agreement made among Egypt, Israel and the United Nations did not hold.
Canadians at the time who would express great pride in our peacemaking participation and tradition were bitterly disappointed and many then began to speak about Canada no longer being the helpful fixer, no longer going out and serving in peacekeeping missions.
After the early successes, as in the Middle East, there had been a series of failures. It was not simply the United Nations emergency force in 1967 but also failures in Congo and to some extent a failure in Cyprus. We hear such sentiments today in similar circumstances and we need to remind ourselves that we faced such challenges to our peacekeeping commitment before.
In the Saturday edition of the Kitchener-Waterloo Record Pam Goebel, a Kitchener native and a reserve army captain who had recently returned from Bosnia, described our work in these terms: ``It is a waste of soldiers' lives, a waste of taxpayers' money. Basically the soldiers feel they are keeping someone alive today so they can be killed tomorrow''.
Captain Goebel's reaction is understandable and seems to be shared by many other Canadians. Bosnia has been an enormous tragedy not only for its own people but also for the United Nations, for NATO, and for us.
What happened with the end of the cold war is that the original concept of peacekeeping has been stretched far beyond its original concept and limits. First, the number of operations is so much larger than it was before. In fact, there has been, as we heard earlier today, as many UN peacekeeping operations after 1989 than in the previous 43 years of the United Nations. Most of these have been successful, a few have not.
Second, it has become clearer, as preceding members have suggested, that the United Nations is unable to meet the demands either physically, conceptually or financially.
Third, and I think this is Canada's major difficulty with the new kind of peacekeeping, peacekeeping is no longer a middle power phenomenon. It is forgotten that in 1956 the peacekeepers who wanted to be there were the British and the French, who after all were the invading armies. It was Pearson's job to tell the British and the French that peacekeeping was not a job for great powers or for super powers, it had to be a job for middle powers. That definition held for many years. But after 1989 and the end of the tensions of the cold war, suddenly the question has to be asked: why are the great powers not there? Britain and France are, but of course Russia and the United States remain outside.
All of these factors deeply influence our position in peacekeeping operations, but I do not think they change the basic precepts. We have participated in every peacekeeping operation but I do not think we can do so in the future. Our resources are limited, the missions are too many.
As we have heard earlier from several speakers, the weakness of the existing UN structure suggests that it would be better for Canada to concentrate on efforts at preventive diplomacy rather than on peacekeeping itself. In the last few years I think it is fair to say that peacekeeping has dominated too much of our foreign policy agenda.
Our skills and knowledge in this country are not simply military. Lester Pearson, after all, the father of peacekeeping, was a poor soldier but an outstanding diplomat.
We should keep in mind that in Bosnia the mistakes that have been made were not made in Sarajevo but rather in New York and Washington and other European capitals.
Canada at one time last year accounted for approximately 10 per cent of the world's peacekeepers, even though our UN assessment was roughly 3 per cent. The United States, whose assessment is 25 per cent, arguably too high, had no soldiers participating under UN command in peacekeeping operations.
We should impress upon the Americans the importance of accepting their responsibilities. It is not enough to issue idle threats of air strikes and pull back from the kinds of commitments to multilateralism that we heard the United States talking about two or three years ago. Indeed there are troubling signs in the United States that recent international events are leading to a resurgence of unilateralism and even isolationalism. That would be a tragedy for the world and especially, I think, for Canada.
What then should we consider doing about Bosnia? We should recognize, above all, that we must do everything possible, politically and diplomatically, to bring an end to this terrible war. However we should not become embittered with the United Nations or relax our involvement with it.
I would argue, as several other speakers have, that we should in fact devote more effort to strengthening that institution. It is not so much the United Nations that has failed but rather the European nations who failed to take responsibility as a regional entity with an event that has such terrible consequences in their own back yard.
I also think that we should, as much as possible, try to make peacekeeping less of a national affair where individual military officers, whether Italian, Canadian or French, are identified as national officers rather than officers serving under the UN command. I think the previous government responded too
quickly to the glamour of peacekeeping and did not recognize the dangers that are so clear today.