Mr. Speaker, this treaty has been an arms control and disarmament objective of successive Canadian governments since the 1960s. The Right Hon. Joe Clark made this issue a high priority when he was foreign minister.
The comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty was open for signature at a special session of the United Nations general assembly in New York on September 24, 1996 and has now been signed by over 150 countries.
Canada played an important role in the treaty's negotiation, in particular in relation to the verification regime. Approximately 15 Canadian monitoring stations will be part of the international monitoring system as well as one radionuclide laboratory.
Canada has also worked with other countries such as Australia to find a way to open the treaty for signature and ratification. Twenty-one countries have now ratified the treaty, including two nuclear weapons states, the United Kingdom and France, and eight of the thirty-nine non-nuclear states designated under the treaty as having nuclear energy or research programs.
They therefore, along with the nuclear weapons states, must also ratify the treaty before it can come into force. Canada, one of the world leaders in nuclear technology for solely peaceful purposes, is a designated state. It is therefore most appropriate and important that Canada be one of the first group countries to ratify the treaty.
I do not underestimate the importance and complexity of this seemingly straightforward legislation. Bill C-52 criminalizes the carrying out of or aiding and abetting in the carrying out of nuclear explosions. It establishes a national authority to serve as a focal point for a liaison between Canada and the CTBTO in Vienna, with other states party to the treaty, and obligates Canadian industry to report large scale chemical explosions which might be confused with nuclear tests. Once passed, this legislation will allow Canada to ratify the treaty.
I want to take a minute to talk about Canada's record. This government made a very weak statement about France's testing in the Pacific. It was clearly a race to a large nuclear capacity for France before ratification. It is also disgraceful that Canada has not pursued more vigorously its assistance to Russia and the former Soviet Union states in demobilizing their nuclear capability.
The Conservative government started with a small fund in the early 1990s to help scholars so that they might remain within Russia and the Soviet Union and not sell their knowledge and dangerous expertise to other countries.
Equally disturbing is this government's lack of response to the troubled Arctic waters. Time and time again, both in Russia and elsewhere, concerns have been raised in relation to the nuclear waste that is embedded on the floor of the Arctic Ocean and, in the words of many, contaminating our waters around the world. This government has paid only lip service to this problem. If this government wishes to be consistent with this new treaty it must again raise these issues as we did in the early 1990s.
In the wake of the 1974 nuclear explosion test by India, using Canadian technology transferred in good faith solely for peaceful purposes, we learned a hard lesson. Under the leadership of my party Canada went on to become one of the first nuclear exporters to require International Atomic Energy Agency full scope safeguards on all our exports of nuclear material to non-nuclear weapons states. We also put in place arrangements to ensure that any transfers for peaceful purposes to a nuclear weapons state would not be diverted for military purposes. These are longstanding Canadian policies which were groundbreaking in their time.
Regrettably, however, against that backdrop of exceedingly high standards and practices must be set the seemingly casual way this government went about signing a nuclear co-operation agreement with China, a nuclear weapons state which still does not require full scope safeguards for its nuclear exports and whose record of proliferation of significant transfers has been dangerous. I want to know how this government can square the ease with which we entered into nuclear co-operation with a communist country with brutal non-proliferation credentials with a very high priority which this government purports to give to preventing the spread of nuclear weapons.
If Canada is to continue to play a leadership role in preventing the spread of nuclear weapons and promoting their successive reduction, we must attend to all aspects of our nuclear policy with equal vigour and credibility. But the government never learns. Why? For money. From the events of last year's APEC summit we know the government cares more about money than human rights. We also know the government cares more about money than it does about world security. We should not so easily forget the lessons of India in the 1970s and the question being raised about our nuclear installations and uses in Canada.
The standing committee on foreign affairs and international trade in the other place has just finished a review of Canada's non-proliferation arms control and disarmament policy. The minister asked that we have full House support for the committee report. My party will be forthright. Nuclear weapons are not land mines. My party supported the minister's efforts in the land mine treaty and congratulate him on his success. We are in favour of stopping proliferation. We are in favour of arms control. The world has been, is currently and will be a dangerous place. Ridding our security system and calling for the U.S. to rid itself of its weapons in Europe is gutting our security system and will make the globe more dangerous, not safer.
This minister talks about 50 years ago. Maybe he should talk about 50 years from now.
Nuclear weapons have been the steadfast cornerstone of western security policy since the creation of NATO in 1949. Unless this minister can outline in the House with detail all the security risks the globe will encounter in the next 50 years my party cannot support the idea of unilateral nuclear disarmament.
While it is certainly an idealistic view, it is not based on reality. The reality is the Russian parliament will not implement START II any time soon. To delude ourselves that it will is very dangerous. The reality is the Chinese are developing more nuclear weapons, not fewer. To delude ourselves that they are not is also very dangerous.
My party is in favour of making the world safer, not making it more dangerous.