Mr. Speaker, last September my wife and I joined with my brothers and my sister for a family reunion and holiday in France. We gathered at a farm in Normandy from which we visited the sites and beaches that World War II has made part of world history today.
Two of my brothers served in uniform during the war but the rest of us were in school. Yet the place names, the events of World War II which cast such a huge shadow on the world then, were a vivid part of our consciousness and of our lives as young people. Whether it is through the awesome silence of Utah Beach, Omaha Beach or Juno Beach where our own Canadian troops landed or whether it is the stunning sight of massive concrete bunkers and gun emplacements left by the Germans, the whole historic coastline tells a story of the savagery, the utter futility and the great sadness of war and armaments.
It is difficult for anyone to visit Bayeux, Caen, Ste. Mère L'Église or Arromanches and not be terribly moved by the huge human cost of warfare and armaments. Each corner echoes the screams of human beings fighting in a deadly war. Thousands upon thousands of lives were literally torn apart by weapons of destruction.
Whether it be bullets or mortar shells, whether it be ocean mines or land mines, weapons of war and destruction know no mercy for their only raison d'être is to maim and destroy. As we visited war graves to pay our respects we were terribly struck by the immensity of the sacrifice. Young adults of 20 years or 25 years of age or sometimes still in their teens had been mowed to death because of one man's folly and pride. Millions of people, in fact tens of millions if we count the huge human losses suffered by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, were sacrificed at the altar of war and weapons of destruction.
I can easily imagine a young Canadian—maybe he was from Quebec of from Manitoba, maybe he was from Vancouver or Toronto or Cape Breton —landing on Juno beach under an infernal shower of explosions. What courage one must have to advance when each step may be the last, when each cannonball, each bullet, each mine becomes an instrument of death that is always more lethal and more destructive than the previous one.
Have we learned our lesson about the futility of war and weapons? Have we learned the lesson taught to us by the thousands of people around the world who have made the ultimate sacrifice, we who are so lucky not to have suffered the same fate?
Unfortunately, hundreds of thousands or even millions of innocent victims continue to pay the price of futile wars and weapons of destruction. Whether yesterday in Mozambique or in Angola, whether yesterday in Bosnia, whether today in Lebanon or in Algeria, just to name these countries, how many innocent people, how many hundreds of thousands of innocent people have endured and continue to endure these atrocious wars when all they want is to live in peace and tranquillity with their family and in their community.
I am immensely grateful that our country should be a land of peace and conciliation, shunning war and shunning armaments as means of settling disputes.
I am deeply thankful for my own children and their children that our country should be so deeply ingrained in the tradition of democracy and peace.
I salute our foreign minister and all those who worked so hard on his initiative to achieve a land mine treaty. I thank him for having led our country toward the tangible expression and achievement of peace in a world which too often and too readily turns to hostilities and weapons of destruction to settle disputes.
May this rapid and amazing success which greeted the Canadian initiative open the way for future international disarmament initiatives. May the land mine treaty be such a powerful symbol of the emerging century that it should lead us to a new world order where peaceful resolution of conflicts replaces the futility, the savagery and the immense human cost of war and weapons of destruction.
In closing, I would like to quote from a poem by one of our colleagues, the member for Cochrane—Superior, in a book of poems that he gave me recently called Semences . I think it tells the reason why we are all together on this initiative.
Where the children shriek Between bursts of machine gun fire Mothers protect their bosoms That give the sweet milk of life Soldiers trample under foot A usurped land In the silence of occupation Where the deaf can hear Speak to me of love.
I, a child, Have no revolver, no tank I do not understand I can no longer play war Yet the grownups Play it so nicely.
I am a child Let me weep And I will grow up tough Let me laugh now while I can For I will not have the time for it When I am a grownup.
Indeed, the land mine treaty is a legacy for the children of the world, that they may behave differently from their elders, ourselves, and learn to live in peace, in real and lasting peace and harmony.