Mr. Speaker, let me begin my remarks, on behalf of my family and all the people I represent in Mississauga, to say how sad we all are and how we share the feelings that have been expressed in this place, throughout this great land and all around the world about the tragedy we witnessed. One of the most incredible aspects, aside from the magnitude of what happened, was the fact that most of us actually witnessed it, if not instantly while it was happening, certainly shortly thereafter. We have seen it replayed numerous times over the past six days.
I was in my office waiting to go into a meeting. CNN was on the television. One building was burning and we were all listening to reports that a plane crash had occurred. Then literally out of the blue another one came along and slammed into the south tower. It did not seem real. It had to be a stunt. It had to be a movie or some kind of a trick. It just did not seem possible that an attack of that magnitude could take place.
I agree with many who have spoken about the significance and infamy of it. As my wife said when she called me, it is another one of those incidents that everyone will know exactly where they were and what they were doing when someone asks them 10, 15 and 20 years from now. It is like the assassination of President Kennedy and many other instances. It is an astounding human tragedy beyond description, beyond comprehension, beyond belief, but it is also reality.
I wish I could embrace some of the members' ideas because we do need to look at change and we do need to learn from the incident in every aspect of our lives. However we must also recognize, as our Prime Minister has said, that we will not live in fear. The president of the United States has said it as well. For us to live in fear, for us to cloak ourselves in security that is beyond the imagination of Canadians is to say to the terrorists “Okay, you win”. We cannot let them win. We must find solutions.
I have heard members today describe the War Measures Act as a solution that should somehow be reactivated, not necessarily in the same way that it was. However while they were talking about the experience under then Prime Minister Trudeau, and some members I realize did not and would not agree with what happened then while others would, they seemed to imply that that should be a template with which we fix this. I am sorry to disagree because I want to find a solution as much as anyone. I want to stand shoulder to shoulder with our American cousins and friends. I want to bring an end, just like everyone in this place, to terrorism in the world. But the FLQ crisis, as tragic as it was, was isolated. Certainly they had difficulty finding the cells; they had difficulty finding the place where Mr. Cross was being held, but it was achievable.
What bothers me about this situation is we are dealing with a monster with tentacles that reach into dozens of countries. It has money that is beyond the financial capability of most countries in the world. It has the ability to inflict terror and damage around the world.
On a local level in Mississauga, I would like to tell the House what I did on Thursday. I was awake most of the night thinking about and replaying what I had seen. I was trying to think what I could do as an individual, as an MP, as a citizen of Mississauga and Canada. There is a place in our community just outside of my riding in the city of Mississauga called Palestine House. Some months ago there was an act of vandalism against the building and the people in it. Some people spray painted swastikas and hate slogans on the building.
At that time there was press coverage about it. There was a lot of discussion. Politicians and I, the mayor and others, were coming around trying to console and trying to understand. Something incredible happened that I will never forget. Rabbi Larry Englander, the rabbi from the Solel Synagogue in my riding, showed up with a cheque from the synagogue to present to the leaders of Palestine House to help them clean up the graffiti on their building. The message from that was that we would not allow that kind of terrorism and that kind of fanaticism to infiltrate the quality of our life here in Canada.
When I arrived at Palestine House on Thursday there was a lot of excitement that an MP was coming to see them. They were pretty upset. There is a school there and people work there. Those people were pretty upset and pretty tense. They escorted me into the back room and I was quite surprised to walk into the middle of a meeting between the leaders of that community and two members of Peel regional police. I asked why the police were there and was told they had had complaints from their children at the school that they were being intimidated and they refused to go school. There apparently had been an incident of some form of violence, of shoving, all related to the tragedy that we all watched on CNN.
That is not Canadian. That is not my Canada. I do not think it is the Canada of any person in this place. That is exactly the kind of incident that we have to strive to stop from taking over the debate in this particular issue.
My good friend, the member for Davenport, made a suggestion that I indeed intended to make and I will repeat it in the hope that this will perhaps add some weight to it, that is, we should be fighting fire with fire and attacking their financial capability. They must have money in bank accounts throughout the world, money that gets funnelled into weapons. Who paid for the $30,000 in flight instruction, in cash? Who paid for the one way airline tickets? Somebody is transferring money around.
We heard questioners in the House today asking if we were prepared to commit military action. What we are talking about there is soldiers on the ground. We were being questioned as to whether we are prepared to send our men and women into harm's way to fight an enemy that is so different from anything any of us have ever experienced before.
I have heard members talk about watching Pearl Harbor and about the trauma of living through World War II. I was born in 1947 so I can only go by what I learned in history, but this is nothing like the experience of World War II, where we could identify an enemy. We knew where they were coming from. It was a terrible, cataclysmic period in our world history but at least we could get a handle on who we were fighting.
I fear that if we stand up in this place and talk the talk we had better be prepared to walk the walk, and walking the walk means sending people walking right into the heart of Taliban country, right into Afghanistan, and two nations, Great Britain and Russia, will testify about what a mistake they made by going into what turned out to be their very own Vietnam.
In my view what we need to do is somehow answer the questions of who we are we fighting and how we can fight them. What are the techniques that we can use? We need to do it united. It does not mean that we are any less committed to fighting and ending terrorism. It just means that we have to recognize that the capabilities these people have are so incredible that they go beyond sending a platoon of soldiers to certain death in a faraway land.
I believe that the leaders in the United States understand that. They have been through it. I believe that our government understands it. It is my sincere hope that we will continue to join with the United States to put an end to terrorism throughout the world, but to do it in a way that will be effective and make sense.