Madam Chairman, I must point out that there was a vote today. I cannot comment on what parties do in the House, but the proceedings will show which parties supported Canada's action in the fight against terrorism.
I am pleased to speak on behalf of the Progressive Conservative/Democratic Representative coalition. I note that we all say our world changed on September 11 but sometimes people repeat phrases without really believing them.
The reality is that when those planes were driven deliberately into crowded buildings in North America with the deliberate purpose of killing as many innocent people as possible our world changed as surely as Japan's world changed at Hiroshima and eastern Europe's world changed when the Berlin wall came down.
The terrorist attacks of September 11 have marked Canadians forever. That day everything changed because since then we have no longer been able to believe in our invulnerability. That day terrorists stole our innocence. They took away the feeling we had in Canada that no matter what havoc was wreaked abroad, here in Canada and in North America we had nothing to fear, we were safe.
In a flash, the massacre in New York City and Washington showed us how poorly prepared we were to face the terrorist threat.
As a country and as individuals we are on uncharted ground. Until now we did not think how we might tell our children there might be anthrax in the mail. No government prepared a defence against passenger planes that might be used as weapons of mass murder and despite the warnings of our intelligence agencies, most Canadians and most members of parliament assumed that terrorists attacked other continents. That has changed now and our way of thinking must change also.
Our coalition believes that Canada must deal with two different basic changes. First is the new threat of a terrorist network that is disciplined, professional, absolutely ruthless, and a network about which far too little is known. When this country was called to conflict before we knew much more about the enemy. Today we do not know the motives, the conditions which formed these terrorists or the targets they might choose next.
Second is the assumption that terrible things do not happen in Canada, not in this wealthy, privileged and insulated society. We are thankfully still a long way from a war zone where every step is a hazard. We must not exaggerate the dangers which ordinary citizens face but neither can we deny the reality that Canada is less safe than we thought and that the underlying confidence of Canadians has been eroded by doubt and fear.
One of the reasons I plead so strongly with the government to be as open as possible with the people of Canada is because honest information is the only answer to doubt and fear. Secrecy feeds fear; facts fight fear.
I ask the government to trust the people, to trust this parliament, and to publish as much as it can about the threats to health and how Canadians can protect themselves. Assessments carried out by our intelligence agencies about the methods and the motives of terrorist groups that we know to be operating here should be made public.
Let me suggest to the Prime Minister why openness is so important now to this government's ability to lead the country. There is a sense among Canadians, who have supported the government in too many consecutive elections, that it has become disconnected from the country it governs. Its political success is due more, I regret to say, to the disarray on this side of the House than it is to any sense of purpose which Canadians draw from the government.
In a crisis such as this one the government needs more authority than that. It can count on the support of most of the members of the House in the hard measures it has to contemplate and propose but it also needs the confidence of a shocked and troubled people. The only way it can win that trust is to show trust itself and not hide the facts which Canadians need to know.
I am the only member in the opposition benches who sat in cabinet and decided whether our country should take up arms. As the Prime Minister said, it is the hardest and most serious of decisions which governments must take. It directly and profoundly affects the safety of our people and the reputation of our country. We learned a decade ago that governments in these circumstances need all the help they can get.
It is in this context that Canadians are now turning to their government, and rightly so. People as a whole want to be reassured, to be shown that the situation is under control and that every effort is being made to stop the terrorist threat today and tomorrow.
In a crisis situation, the government must play such a role quickly and unequivocally. It is its duty.
Therefore, I must voice my support for the government's decision to be actively involved in the international military coalition. I did so this morning by introducing a motion in the House in support of the involvement of Canadian forces in the efforts of the international military coalition. I am doing it again this evening.
Moreover, I applaud the efforts made by the government to finally bring in an anti-terrorism bill. In principle, this legislation is a good start. Of course, it will need to be properly scrutinized since in certain respects it could have an impact on our fundamental rights. But it is a useful tool, which should be supported as swiftly as possible.
However, in order to really reassure people, the governement must show that things are under control, that it has an action plan. It must keep the people informed so that they are not plagued by uncertainty.
Let me raise four areas where the government can do more than it appears to be doing. The first area concerns information and intelligence. The al-Qaeda network and its allies work beyond the range of the traditional intelligence services of Canada and our allies. We do not know enough about them and as things now stand we are not in a position to learn.
Over the last seven years the government has cut the budget of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service by 37%. Our intelligence agencies have little capacity to speak the languages or understand the cultures of the world in which these terrorists work, plan and recruit. Working with our allies we must repair that weakness urgently.
We have an advantage in this diverse and international country in that so many of our private citizens work in the languages and understand the cultures where we need help. I hope the Prime Minister would come to parliament and spell out funding and hiring initiatives for our intelligence agencies which would markedly improve our ability to understand how and why these terrorist networks have grown and how they might be broken.
As important as it is for us to secure our borders we must recognize that these terrorists are highly professional. They do not sneak in the back door. They use their skill, knowledge and wealth to come in the front door of countries like Canada. That is what happened with the pilots who turned the hijacked planes into weapons in the United States. We need the best intelligence to know about their networks.
The second area concerns traditional diplomacy. This morning I spoke about the need to enforce and enlarge our defence budgets. My colleague from Pictou--Antigonish--Guysborough has just handed me a relevant quotation from Winston Churchill from another time but the point is valid:
The Army is not like a limited liability company to be reconstructed, remodelled, liquidated and refloated from week to week as the money market fluctuates. It is not an inanimate thing, like a house to be pulled down, or structurally altered at the caprice of the owner; it is a living thing. If it is bullied, it sulks; if it is unhappy, it pines; if it is harried, it gets feverish; if it is sufficiently disturbed, it will wither and dwindle and almost die; and when it comes to this last serious condition, it is only revived by lots of time and lots of money.
That was true then; that is true now. What was also true then and now is an effective defence must be married to an effective diplomacy. I have written the foreign minister urging him to take initiatives within the Commonwealth where Canada's reputation is strong and whose other members include countries like Pakistan, Nigeria, India and others whose knowledge and co-operation would be invaluable to the coalition against the terrorist threat.
The same capacity exists in la Francophonie and in Canada's other connections with a world that may be more comfortable working with us than it is with a superpower or a former colonial power. I hope the Prime Minister would outline in detail what diplomatic steps Canada is taking.
The third area is domestic. We need tough and effective measures to stop terrorists if they get here precisely because they are so professional. The bill introduced by the Minister of Justice today is a step in that direction.
Now that airliners have become weapons the government will not be taken seriously and the public will not feel safe until the Prime Minister puts air marshals in Canadian skies.
Finally, we need to hear from the Prime Minister about Canada's plans for the period when the attacks have stopped in Afghanistan and when we have more knowledge and control of al-Qaeda and the other terrorist networks. Canada did not seem well prepared for the attacks.
Other nations led the response which we have now joined. However Canada has a unique role and responsibility in building the systems and standards that come after these attacks. That will involve a major commitment to international development, where Canada's contribution under the government has fallen from .49% of gross national product in 1994 to .25% this year.
This is an area in which Canada has a unique opportunity to lead. I would hope the Prime Minister would spell out the leadership he intends Canada to take.
We would all like to say to Canadians that we will soon emerge from this period of anger, sorrow and fear. We would like to tell them that Canada faces no direct threat, that the rest of the world will protect us from harm, but none of that is true or certain.
What is certain is that our public life, our political life, must change. We in politics must be more vigilant, must challenge the status quo and must shape opinion rather than simply trying not to run afoul of it. We must present a more coherent view of the world and of Canada's role in it. We must build support for our views and we must argue strenuously against views we think are wrongheaded. We must defend the Islamic faith against prejudice and attack and recognize that its worst enemy right now is the al-Qaeda network.
At a time when the United States of America has had the courage to lead, we must stand beside the United States, support her people, work with her government, share her risks and join in the responsibility to limit the suffering of the innocent Afghani people. To do less or to do differently at this moment in time would be to dishonour the tradition of Canada with which we have been entrusted.
As the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition have both noted, party leaders 12 days ago visited the site called ground zero in New York City. The media pictures could not convey the silence and the size of the disruption, this inanimate pile of what had been so full of life, so full of energy.
A friend of my daughter had been staying near the site. She e-mailed that night to say “We all say we're fine, but we're not. None of us is fine”.
Well, Madam Chairman, we are not fine, but we are strong. There are reasons we believe in free and orderly and modern societies. Part of our response must be to put panic aside and deny the terrorists the psychological victory they seek. We must demonstrate that free societies can recover quickly from the most brutal shock and organize ourselves to assert the civilized values that were so deliberately challenged. In meeting that challenge this House stands united.