Mr. Speaker, I welcome the opportunity to participate in this debate about reforming the international organizations.
I will use my time to talk about some of the reforms that I think are important with respect to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the United Nations but also with respect to the WTO, which is an increasingly important international organization that has been left out of the member's motion.
First, with respect to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, this motion is particularly timely in the sense that in a few weeks from now there will be a meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in Washington. I, and I am sure other members of parliament, are aware that a great many Canadians are planning to visit Washington in the same way that a great many Canadians paid a visit to Seattle at the end of November and early December. They are going to pay a visit to Washington and to the meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in order to signify their displeasure, dissatisfaction and objection to the way in which the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank now operates, in the same way as they did with the World Trade Organization.
There is a growing feeling among a great many Canadians, and for that matter thinking people and democrats all around the world, that these international organizations are not serving the global community well, that they do need to be reformed and that they need to be made more democratic and more representative. They need to be restructured in such a way that they are more sensitive to the needs of all peoples of the world and not just the multinational corporations whose ideology and whose world view tends to infuse and take over these organizations.
I am not sure if that is what the hon. member for Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca had in mind when he was calling for the reform of these organizations but it is certainly what I have in mind when I talk about the reform of these organizations, and what a lot of other Canadians have in mind when they talk about the reform of these organizations.
When I think about the World Bank, I am reminded of the restructuring programs that were imposed on so many third world countries by the World Bank. These restructuring programs were not restructuring programs. They were a cover for the World Bank imposing a particular ideology on these third world countries. What it often meant was that these countries had to cut back on what little social services and health care they had in their countries.
I remember, going back to when the Conservatives were in power, the person who later became a Liberal Cabinet minister was the head of CIDA at that time, Mr. Massé. I remember confronting him in committee at that time with the fact this restructuring program of the World Bank and the IMF was causing the death of hundreds of thousands of children who were being cut off from basic social services in order to satisfy the ideology of the banks with respect to debt repayment.
This sort of thing continues to this very day. When push comes to shove, capital must be protected. It really does not matter as long as it is indirect. It really does not matter how many people have to die, particularly children and the powerless, in order to protect the rights of capital and the rights of people who have lent money and want their interest and want it all. They had a name for this in the Bible. They used to call it usury. It used to be condemned and thought of as something that was morally reprehensible. We now have a whole financial system that depends on it, that thrives on it.
To the extent that the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have no critical perspective on this at all, they not only need to be reformed, their basic principles need to be re-thought, particularly in this year which is the year of the jubilee being celebrated by the churches, calling upon all Canadians and their governments in the year 2000 to extend significant debt relief to the poorest countries of the world so that these countries have a chance to crawl out of the hole that they are in. Oftentimes the hole has been created by governments and regimes that are long gone, holes that have been created by fluctuations and depressions in commodity prices that are long gone, but the people of these countries are indentured to this debt forever and ever because we cannot seem to break the hold of the ideology that the IMF and the World Bank represent to the world.
I only have limited time and I would not want to spend all my time on the IMF and the World Bank.
The motion also mentions the United Nations. In that context, I think we would all like to see a strengthening of the United Nations. We would all like to see it perhaps in Canada but not everyone in the world would like to see it.
One of the things that bothered me not so long ago, when I was at a NATO north Atlantic parliamentary assembly meeting, was the way in which Americans kept talking about how regrettable it was that NATO had to do all these things because the United Nations was too weak. This is coming from the same country that does not pay its dues to the United Nations. No wonder the United Nations is weak, when the most powerful country in the world will not pay its dues to the United Nations. They cannot have it both ways. They cannot lament the weakness of the United Nations and say “We are just going to have NATO do that because the UN is so weak” and, at the same time, be directly contributing to its weakness through their own refusal to pay their dues to that very organization.
That is something that I think needs to be said when we are talking about UN reform. One could make a whole speech about UN reform.
Of course when it comes to the World Trade Organization, this is an organization that also needs to be seriously reformed, if not completely abolished. We need to start from scratch with an organization that is not committed to entrenching the rights of the powerful while leaving the rights of the powerless to be dealt with another day, which is exactly what we have in the current WTO.