Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with my colleague from Nanaimo--Cowichan. It has been one week ago today and how the world has changed.
I walked into a colleague's office in Ottawa. It was my first stop of the day and his assistant asked me if I heard what was happening in New York. As we watched the television he said that two planes had hit the World Trade Center. We immediately knew this was not a coincidence and that something was happening that no one had ever foreseen.
As events unfolded, work ground to a standstill. We heard that people had started to evacuate the Centre Block. Other people working on the Hill left for home, not sure how vulnerable we might be in the capital of Canada, just to the north of what had happened in New York.
Then the second tower of the World Trade Center collapsed like something in a movie. We knew that thousands of innocent lives had been snuffed out in the span of just a few seconds.
When I was much younger, my husband was mowing the lawn on a long June night. I went to bed and when I woke up the next morning he was not in bed. I found him outside, dead of a heart attack. I have some idea of the grief and the shock that some of the people last week experienced, but what happened to my husband was an act of nature, something that is at least comprehensible.
What happened to thousands of people in New York city, including Canadians, had no comprehensible reason. It was a simple act of slaughter of innocent people driven by hatred and a love of destruction. That is something completely incomprehensible to us, to the families, to the loved ones and friends of the people who are not with us today but who were alive just a week ago.
Since that time I have visited the U.S. embassy in Ottawa and saw the whole front of its metal railing stuffed with masses of flowers, cards, posters, candles, and messages of condolences, concern, sympathy and prayers. They were reaching out to the people who were affected by this terrible tragedy in New York, including Canadians reaching out to their friends and their neighbours across the border.
I have had, as have other members of parliament, an outpouring of e-mails and calls from people asking how they can help, what they can do, how they can make sense of and contribute toward rectifying this terrible situation. People are groping for some kind of meaning and some kind of focus after a tragedy that was never before contemplated.
Canadians are also concerned about what can happen in the future. What does this mean for the future? Will the people who have no morality, no human feeling, who caused the death of these innocent people, stop at this or will there be other targets and deaths?
People have concerns about our security system. Canadians do not want to be vulnerable. We do not want to be at risk. We want to know that people in charge of our safety are doing their jobs and that we can trust them to look after our interests. Unfortunately what we know has not been very reassuring.
Here are some of the troubling facts that have been reported recently. A secret CSIS report, compiled in May, shows that terrorist groups from around the world are extremely active in Canada. It lists by name and description the organizations in this country and how they are operating within Canada's borders. It states that these groups are raising money for their activities on Canadian soil.
The report describes the Algerian national who was arrested in December 1999 trying to cross from Canada into the U.S. in a car carrying enough explosives to blow up a large building. It also states that there is evidence supplied by the French police and by Interpol that money is leaving Canada and going to terrorist bases in Algeria.
It speaks of a retired immigration official who worked for 31 years with immigration and was one of 10 elite immigration control officers in the world who says that our immigration officials never got their act together. He also claims that groups known internationally for heroin trafficking and links to companies with operations in Canada have shipped missile technology and biological warfare components from Canada to North Korea, Pakistan, Iraq and Iran. However, the study that detailed all this was terminated in 1997 with an order to destroy all the files.
Last February, Canada signed the international convention for the suppression of the financing of terrorism, but as of yet we have passed no law to actually put that agreement into effect.
There are other troubling circumstances that have come to our attention. A program on CBC radio last Saturday called The House , featured the vice-president of the Canadian Association for Security Intelligence Studies,who served at senior levels of the public service for 34 years dealing with international relations and intelligence matters. He said that about a year ago and very quietly our Canadian government decided to export crypto analytical equipment to foreign buyers.
This is highly technical machinery for encoding and protecting information which we handed over to terrorists. It would allow them to communicate secretly and therefore allow them to carry out operations such as what happened one week ago, with success. He also stated that we have been making a series of errors and that Canada for far too long has been sitting on institutions that are basically second World War II institutions, cold war institutions. Now is the time to rethink them.
There was also a comment made by Major General Lewis MacKenzie who served in the gulf war. He stated that the federal government had failed to fund the military and had left the country unable to contribute anything to this crisis other than a token force.
The inadequacy of Canada's security system has been known for some time. Our motion today helps the House take the leadership that our country needs at this critical hour. It addresses the protection of the public in a thoughtful, practical and effective way.
All speakers in the House have said that we value democracy, freedom, peace, order and good government. When we value things we protect them. They are important to us and we mean business. Now is not the time to equivocate and falter; now is the time to act. I urge members of the House to support the motion before us today.