Madam Speaker, I thank hon. members for allowing me to close with a few minutes on this motion.
The motion which I put forth last year is one which comes out of my experiences working in Africa during the Mozambique civil war. During that time we saw all manner of horrors that were inflicted on people, primarily civilians.
We know that 90% of the individuals who are hurt, maimed, raped, killed, tortured in today's conflicts are innocent civilians.
After the close of the cold war when the Berlin wall came crashing down, the world thought we would have a peace dividend, but this just unleashed a plethora of conflicts around the world. More than 50 conflicts have sprung up which have put very large demands, both financial and in terms of personnel, on all of us as nations but also on the international organizations.
We knew for a long time that Rwanda was going to blow up. Kosovo was going to blow up. Burundi, Angola, the Horn of Africa, Ethiopia, and the list goes on. We saw these precursors to conflict taking place and the world did nothing to prevent it. The consequence of that has been the death, maiming and torture of hundreds of thousands if not millions of innocent people around the world.
We have an extraordinary opportunity to do something about that. Canada has had a moral persuasive force for many years and has been seen by some as a country that stands in the middle and is able to bring different groups together with a common purpose. Not many countries can do that.
Motion No. 30 will enable us to deal with the precursors to conflict and reform the international organizations such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the UN by working with our other member states to reform these institutions to prevent conflict.
How can they prevent conflict? By utilizing economic levers that are used to fuel wars. It takes money to run a war. If we can choke off the money supply, we can choke off the war, not always, but sometimes.
If we allow the status quo to remain, as my colleague from the NDP mentioned, there will continue to be people with their limbs chopped off, people with hot stakes poked in their eyes to blind them, people who have been gang raped, children being used to carry landmines who are blown up as a consequence, and children being used as soldiers in conflict. This cannot be allowed to continue.
If we do not debate this on humanitarian grounds, then at least as a cogent financial argument we can argue on self interest as nations of the world. When a conflict blows up half a world away, it will come back to haunt us in terms of putting our soldiers in harm's way, and putting demands on our defence, foreign aid and foreign affairs budgets.
These demands are actually crushing international organizations, particularly the World Bank whose post-conflict reconstruction costs have increased 800% in the last 12 years. The IMF continues to fund countries that siphon off the funds to buy arms to slaughter innocent civilians.
If we accept the status quo then we are part and parcel of the slaughter that takes place as we speak. Innocent civilians are being tortured in the most heinous ways or are being killed without mercy. We as a nation can do something about that.
I am encouraged by the support this motion has had across party lines. I am confident that as members of different political parties, we can come together to support the motion. It will give the government and members across party lines the ability to work together to act in a leadership role in utilizing the IMF, the World Bank and the UN as levers for the prevention of deadly conflict. At the end of the day it is something we will all be proud of and which we can proudly take to our constituents. More important, we will be doing much to save some of the most innocent people in the world from terrible fates.