Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure for me to speak today in favour of the bill put forward by my colleague from Saanich-Gulf Islands.
We hear everyone praising our peacekeepers. We talk about our peacekeepers everywhere we go. It is a Canadian tradition. Every high school student in Canada is taught that the Right Hon. Lester B. Pearson invented peacekeeping in the 1950s to defuse the Suez Canal crisis. Yet it seems to me at times that we certainly as governments over the last number of years have been ashamed of that fact. We have never seen fit to give a medal to our own Canadian peacekeepers, as was mentioned so eloquently a moment ago by the hon. member for Nanaimo-Cowichan.
I have listened to the debate over the last five years in the House and when we brought the matter before the Standing Committee on National Defence and Veterans Affairs. There has to be a better way of recognizing our military people. Canadians have served in practically every peacekeeping effort since the Suez crisis from Cyprus to Cambodia and from Pakistan to the Israeli withdrawal from Egypt.
Our peacekeepers have served Canada and the United Nations well. They have brought honour to our country and they should be appropriately recognized. For a country with our tradition it is only fitting that a government strike a volunteer service medal for those Canadians who served in peacekeeping operations.
We are not talking about special treatment of privileges. We are talking about honour. Right now, as has been mentioned many times here, our peacekeepers receive a medal from the United Nations for their service. However they do not receive a medal from their own country. That is a shame.
Some people have suggested that such a move is unprecedented. That is not so. As has been said today, the volunteers in Korea have received a Canadian medal to commemorate their service to peace. Granted, they waited 40 years and probably would never have received it except that we committed troops at the time of the gulf war in 1991. At that time it was deemed to be a special area and a medal would be struck for that. It was pretty hard for the government not to come through with a medal for the Canadian people who served in Korea.
We tend to play down this business of giving medals to our troops who serve in various areas. Maybe that has some merit at times. There are countries that some people think give too many medals. I have come to know a lot of the people who participated in peacekeeping efforts around the world in the last number of years. We have come into our own as a country. We have served in every conflict in this century. I believe the time has come to change the rules if that is what we have to do.
No one has said anything about the royal prerogative, but maybe it is time that we took a look at the way things are done. We are great people in the House of all political parties for saying it is time for change. I found last summer as we travelled the country looking at our defence policy that sometimes it was hard to change things. Sometimes it is hard to change minds, even though we all go in with grandiose plans for making things work differently.
It would be a shame if we fail to provide recognition of our peacekeeping veterans, the same recognition we gave to people who served in the Korean war and the first and second world wars. I do not think these people should have to wait 40 and 50 years for the government to give them credit where credit is due.
Canada is a country that is called on. We have more missions going now than we have had for many years. We are always ready to do our part even with dwindling resources and not the best equipment that our people should have out there. We do not hear them complain about it. We see letters from organizations across the country urging us to support the bill that we bring forward a peacekeeping medal and clasp for our peacekeepers.
We have not gone far enough in this age. We talked about it, as I said, in 1990 in the Standing Committee on National Defence and Veterans Affairs. Perhaps, as has been suggested, it should lie with this committee to bring forth a way of doing it without having the wrath of the government against us or the wrath of those in Parliament who do not believe these things are noble or necessary.
We should be ashamed of ourselves as governments and as parliaments for not having done something sooner. The gulf war had to come along before the Korean veterans were recognized with their own distinctive Canadian medal. I see nothing wrong with the soldiers getting the United Nations medal and one from our own country.
At the end of the day I hope there is some resolve that we can send the matter to committee and have some recommendations come forward. I do not believe for a moment we are doing anything wrong by recommending that we give this medal to our peacekeepers. It would be a great day in our country if we could do that. We can sit here and talk about all the rules to stop this legislation. They are there, but I do not see why we cannot come up with some way to change them and make this medal a reality.