Mr. Speaker, I listened carefully to my colleague's speech.
Maybe he does not know it, but there have been votes in the House to decide whether our troops would take part in military missions abroad. I will not give a list of these votes since somebody else did it in a previous speech.
So there is a precedent in the House where parliament was used as an important tool in the area of foreign policy.
I want to ask the member if he thinks that, considering the seriousness of the current situation in Kosovo and in the Balkans, a vote in parliament would be an important tool that should be used by the government to tell the international community that not only do the Government of Canada and the parties represented in the House of Commons agree on this issue, but that all members of the House of Commons share the same position with regard to the need to send in ground troops.
Would it not have some political weight and would it not advance the cause of democracy if we showed all Canadians that the members they elected to represent them in parliament had the opportunity to vote on this most important issue?