Madam Speaker, it is very distressing to me to hear that the government is once again going to invoke closure or time allocation to limit our debate on another bill in the House. I find it abhorrent that this government continues this practice.
I am also sorry that the hon. member who last spoke has left because he reconfirmed something that I have thought for the last six years, that this government has no ability to walk and chew gum at the same time. He talked about fuzzing up the issue and bringing in too many things to consider at any one time. I would like to think that it is only the Liberals who do not have the ability to look at a much broader vision of how the world can work together and how Canada can participate in working with other countries to resolve some of the situations in which we find ourselves.
I would like to speak to private member's Motion No. 338 that my hon. colleague and seatmate, the member for Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, has submitted to the House. I do not feel that he is placing the government in a difficult position at all. All he is asking is that the government convene a meeting of like-minded nations to develop foreign policy, to develop a concept to prevent conflict around the world and to step in before it becomes war. When the signs are there that it is inevitable, the nations of the world could figure out how to determine what the signals are, what we should be looking for and then what our response to those signals should be.
I cannot understand how government members can see any reason for not supporting the motion. I do not understand it.
We have many world organizations—NATO, the United Nations, the IMF—which have the jurisdiction or the ability to talk to nations about various issues, to sit down and try to come to some resolution, but it is not working.
There are many reasons it is not working. We all have identified and even the organizations themselves have identified the need to reform these organizations. It would not hurt to have like-minded nations sit down to talk about how things could be changed and to reform the various institutions of which we are a part.
We have the situation now where NATO is in the former Yugoslavia. There are criticisms that NATO stepped in when it should not have, that it should have been the United Nations. However, the United Nations was not prepared to move. Even if it had moved, it is after the fact. Conflict has broken out. It should have looked at the evidence, at the situation and at the signals that this was going to happen and it should have stepped in many years ago to try to resolve the issues.
The hon. member for Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca has written a number of papers on this issue. He has looked at it very deeply and has come up with a number of ways in which these issues could be sorted out and various responses that could be developed.
I want to share with the House some of the issues that he feels could be dealt with. He has listed a number of things which indicate that there could be difficulties which could lead to crises and he reports on the ways that we could respond to them. For example: to have diplomatic initiatives to diffuse the tensions between ethnic groups and encourage peacekeeping initiatives between these rival groups; to introduce positive information to counter the negative information that is being spread; to have an international arms registry that deals with specific arms, which would go a long way to adding a measure of transparency and accountability where there are military organizations.
The member feels that one of the most important ways is to bring in the international financial institutions, especially the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Why I would agree with my hon. colleague that these are important is because so often in world crisis situations the provinces with the wealth, the developed nations, are asked to enter into a conflict in terms of a military or peacekeeping venture, as we have seen with Kosovo, but when the conflict is over they are asked to be the primary supporters in the post-conflict restructuring.
I would suggest that perhaps through these international financial institutions we could have the ability to extend that lever or carrot to those nations that have conflict so perhaps they could find more peaceful resolutions and be rewarded with financial support for resolving those issues that are bringing this conflict to a head.
When countries enter a conflict and show a lack of response to their citizens by not recognizing the human rights of their citizens, those nations should be sanctioned by those international monetary organizations. They should not be funded for the building up of arms or for the setting up of governments that do not respect human rights.
I appreciate that our western civilization puts a lot of emphasis on individual rights and that the European tradition is perhaps not geared that way, that the European and Asian traditions are geared more to collective rights as opposed to individual rights. However, I think there is a respect worldwide for the need to recognize human rights. No nation, whether it believes in collective rights or individual rights, has the right to kill, to hold in captivity or to expel their minorities or their citizens who they have problems and difficulties with.
Even though there might be a different approach to individual or collective rights, as an international community we have to use the ability we have, either through foreign aid or loans through the International Monetary Fund, to reward those countries that are developing in a humane way and treating their citizens with respect and sanction those that are not. That is a powerful tool.
A meeting of like minds is all the motion is suggesting. It is suggesting that Canada initiate a meeting with nations that can start to collectively put their minds together on how to identify nations that are reaching a position of conflict or are getting into a situation that may go beyond what is considered to be acceptable behaviour or treatment. It is to get these nations to start thinking on how we can avoid such situations. It is to consider what kind of sanctions or methods we can use to intervene in those cases.
My colleague deserves a lot of credit for being far-reaching in his outlook on international affairs and for not being afraid to consider what others would think might be impossible. I would like to join my hon. colleague from Fraser Valley in saying that my colleague from Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca chose once before to reach out on, what other people thought was impossible, the landmine issue. He showed them that it can work.
I would like to commend the member for those efforts with the landmine issue. I would like to commend him for making us think that something else that looks impossible might be possible if we put our minds together.
I hope the Liberals will see fit to support the motion.