Mr. Speaker, on October 21 I asked the Minister for Foreign Affairs when Canada would introduce legislation to ratify the chemical weapons convention and what Canada was doing to support the enforcement agency which was to be set up in The Hague.
The chemical weapons convention is the result of 24 years of work at the Geneva disarmament conference and had its origins in the first world war when poison gas attacks caused 1.3 million casualties and 100,000 fatalities. Canadians will recall that many Canadian soldiers were killed by gas attacks in the first world war. Therefore this treaty should mean a lot.
Following the first world war and the horror of people all over the world at the use of gas during that conflict, there was an attempt to get a treaty to ban chemical weapons. We did get the 1925 Geneva protocol which banned the use of chemical weapons in war, but there was no enforcement agency and there was no provision against the production or stockpiling or trading in chemical weapons.
This treaty that I am talking about tonight was signed in Paris, France in the middle of January 1993. It bans the use of chemical weapons and also the development, manufacture, distribution, transfer and stockpiling of chemical weapons. It also provides for the monitoring, inspection and enforcement of the treaty and provides for penalties when the treaty is broken.
It is the most complete disarmament treaty ever developed and has the most comprehensive system of verification and compliance of any multilateral disarmament treaty.
The problem is that while the treaty was signed by 150 countries, it requires 65 ratifications to make it enforceable. So far only 16 have ratified after nearly two years. Only 16 have ratified and we need 65 to make it enforceable.
I put my question to the Minister for Foreign Affairs: When will Canada table legislation to ratify this treaty and what is it doing to support the enforcement agency which is called the organization for the prohibition of chemical weapons to be set up in The Hague in the Netherlands?
I would hope the minister's parliamentary secretary would have an answer for me tonight.