Mr. Speaker, there are a variety of ways in which Canadians are now making their voices heard.
The thrust of the argument which Lesley Choyce, the Nova Scotian and former American, put forward this weekend was that every single person who has contacts, whether they be political colleagues, personal friends, family members, or students with whom one may have gone to school, should be urging them to make their opposition to a war in Iraq known to their elected officials.
There is a lot of evidence that people increasingly are saying that they really do not expect that their politicians will do anything about this. That is very worrisome. Not only is that very condemning of what it is we all think we are doing here, it is very dangerous if we think about the responsibility of government virtually being abandoned by the citizenry because they do not believe that their elected representatives and their leaders actually are going to take a stand in the face of something as horrifying as launching a war in Iraq.
I found a further source of encouragement on the weekend. I do not know this gentleman, Leonard Friesen, who is the chair of the global studies program at Sir Wilfrid Laurier. In the Kitchener-Waterloo Record , he spoke about the fact that there are more people searching for an alternative to the escalating spiral of militarized madness. He went on to remind us--and it is important for us to remind our American friends, family members and colleagues of this--that $400 billion U.S. is spent on the military on an annual basis, making it by far the most militarized state on the planet.
Just think for a moment about what it means. The so-called security assistance that is being given to countries to help them with their own development of security and civilized infrastructure, programs, supports and so on, amounts to less than $10 billion U.S. a year. Compare the two, $400 billion U.S. for militarization and $10 billion in terms of foreign aid that actually would help with that human security network which surely is the true alternative to war in this world.