Mr. Speaker, the NDP congratulates the international campaign to ban land mines and the 1,000 NGOs from 60 countries that backed the treaty process. We also congratulate Mines Action Canada with which we were pleased to work in the last Parliament helping to copy and forward the many letters of support it was generating to all cabinet ministers.
The Canadian government and other governments responded to the work of the NGOs, and that is good. Unfortunately the Americans have not seen fit to sign on. We hope they and others will yet see the light.
What we need now is a similar but even more comprehensive and successful dynamic to develop around the need to abolish nuclear weapons, which pose a threat to the entire human prospect. Let the recent success on land mines be only the latest but not the last step in banning particular evils from our midst.