Mr. Speaker, my thanks to the minister and to the government for providing me with an opportunity to participate in this debate.
I will begin by sending my congratulations to the new Minister of Foreign Affairs, the hon. member for Winnipeg South Centre. I had the opportunity to work with the new Minister of Foreign Affairs when he was the foreign affairs critic for the official opposition in a previous Parliament and I was as I am now the foreign affairs critic for the NDP.
We had the opportunity to work together on the Standing Committee on External Affairs and International Trade. We also worked together as members of a much smaller committee, the Special Committee on the Central America Peace Process, which was created around the time of the peace process in 1988.
The special committee made recommendations for Canadian participation in Central America with respect to the training of police and to create in countries where the police have not always had it, the political neutrality one would expect from police. Canada had a role in training police forces in that part of the world.
By way of extending that conclusion we came to with respect to Central America, I have no problem listening to the minister's arguments being offered tonight about the need to consolidate and to amplify what progress has already been made in Haiti with respect to the training of police with a view to creating further stability in that country.
It is a very new democracy which exists in Haiti in spite of the fact that it has been independent for almost 200 years as a member just mentioned. That new democracy when it first came into being with the election of former President Aristide did not last very long. One of the reasons it did not last very long was that the political culture and civil infrastructure and all the things that are necessary to support the democratic experiment were not there. It was not long before the military, who were used to running the country, decided that they did not like this experiment. The next thing was that the new president was in exile.
I am convinced that President Aristide was in exile a lot longer than he had to be. The Americans were not in any hurry to have President Aristide back in power in Haiti because of his ideological leanings. They took their sweet time knowing that the constitution in Haiti prevented President Aristide from running for re-election. The longer they took, the less time President Aristide would have when he actually returned to Haiti.
I feel it was only in the final analysis that the Americans were embarrassed into doing something about Haiti. As a result we have had a new election in Haiti and we have a successor to President Aristide, a man who I understand has served as President Aristide's prime minister.
In a way the will of the people of Haiti, which was expressed in that first election but which was overthrown first by the military and then by the delay in doing anything to get President Aristide back has been expressed again. We hope this time around it can be expressed not only in terms of the election but also in terms of giving that government the opportunity to implement policies consistent with what the people thought they were voting for in this most recent presidential election.
We therefore support in principle the government's apparent decision to respond to the call of the UN to take over command of the UN operation in Haiti. Like others who have spoken here tonight, we wish we had more details in front of us, some cost estimates, rules of engagement. We wish we had specific numbers as to what troops will be sent and how many in addition to the people already there, all those kinds of things.
We understand it might have been difficult for the government to come up with this information by now, although one wonders about that. We do understand this matter has been in dispute at the United Nations and therefore the government might not want to second guess the outcome of the debate at the United Nations or at least it might not want to second guess it until necessary. In effect we are doing that tonight.
The government was in some difficulty with respect to the timing which is why we were willing to co-operate with the minister in order to permit this debate tonight. In spite of the fact that member for Swift Current-Maple Creek-Assiniboia thinks more productive discussions might be going on in bars somewhere in Ottawa, this is nevertheless the beginning of a good tradition that whenever Canadian troops are deployed there is an opportunity to discuss it in Parliament.
We are discussing the issue in the sense that there is no real proposal to debate and there are no real details to debate. There is no motion to vote on. Nevertheless this is a worthy procedure that perhaps if improved could be something we do with more detail, in a more timely fashion and that we do not just do as a gesture to parliamentary accountability. Rather, we should have something more substantive in nature.
Having said we support this in principle, we enter the caveat that we reserve the right to be critical of the government in future if we come across ways this is being implemented that we find to be inadequate.
The minister said he was thinking about having the committee act as a sort of monitoring agency for this Canadian operation and perhaps for others. I welcome that gesture on the part of the minister. I am not exactly sure what he has in mind for the committee, but certainly the idea of there being some kind of parliamentary oversight on this kind of thing is worth exploring.
I regret to say that as much as I think it is a good idea, since New Democrats are not allowed to be full members of committees, we might not be able to participate in this to the extent we would like, perhaps not at all. That is a shame. A number of us have had a lot of experience in the House, in foreign affairs, on that particular committee, and on special committees struck to deal with external affairs issues. Yet we find ourselves frozen out of the process. That is regrettable.
As we commit these Canadians to this task in Haiti for six months, presumably-although it is not clear exactly how long because these things have a tendency to grow or to be extended-we need to commit ourselves to a way of understanding the situation in Haiti and in other countries that realizes the limits of electoral democracy. It is not just enough to have elections.
The government has recognized that to some degree by saying we need a police force trained in ways of policing that are not politically motivated. Too often police forces and the military in that part of the world are an extension of the political agenda of the government of the day. To some degree the limits of elections in and by themselves have been recognized by the government.
I also hope the government would be working not just with respect to Haiti but with respect to a number of other countries in that area of the world, particularly Central America, to do what it can to put pressure on those governments which have been legitimately or democratically elected but which continue to permit, to encourage, to turn a blind eye to or however we describe it, which would vary from country to country, human rights violations in spite of the fact that elections have now been held and the presidents of various countries are democratically elected.
I am thinking of Guatemala. Hardly a day goes by in my office that I do not get a letter from some Canadian concerned about what is happening to Guatemalan refugees returning to Guatemala. There is a great deal of concern about some of the things that have
happened recently in El Salvador and in Nicaragua. These are all countries which became democratic in the 1980s.
I hope the attention of the minister could be turned to what the Canadian government could be doing in that respect as well. In the meantime, what we are committing ourselves to in Haiti seems to be something we all must collectively hope works out for the best for the people of Haiti and for the future of democracy in that region.