Mr. Speaker, it was a little over a month ago that I walked with my three sons in Vancouver in a peace march. I walked not as a politician and I walked very quietly. I walked with mothers, I walked with babies, I walked with senior citizens, I walked with church people and for a short time, I walked with my colleagues, physicians against war. There was a sense that day of people coming together and there was a sense of hope. There was a sense that with goodwill, one could change things, that with goodwill, one could move forward, that with goodwill, one could avert an impending disaster. People who had never walked before, walked on that day. I felt quite humbled. I walked as a mother, I walked as a physician and I walked as a Canadian.
Today many people voiced how surprised they were that the Prime Minister finally came up with what they consider to be a focus and to point clearly on what Canada wished to do with regard to Iraq. I was not surprised because I knew all along that the Prime Minister, whose mentor was Lester Pearson, who worked with the government of Pierre Trudeau, who in fact has followed in a long line of Liberal governments, would do the right thing. I know what he has always felt. He has a commitment to multilateralism and he has a commitment to the United Nations. It has always been thus. He is a strong Liberal, with clear Liberal values. I have never doubted his position for a moment. I always thought his position was particularly clear. However his position today made me again, one more time in the last month and a half, proud to be a Canadian.
Tonight I watched the President of the United States, George W. Bush, speak. For the first time, I felt a strong sense of despair. I felt all hope, all the best ideas of men and women of goodwill, the Canadian position that we brought forward and that I was so proud of when Paul Heinbecker went to the United Nations and brought forward a set of ideas within which we could set guidelines and timelines for a process of disarmament within Iraq, all those things, had come to naught.
In fact and indeed when George W. Bush made his speech today, I got a sense that it was not whether he would consider if there would be a war but that he had determined all along that he would go to war, it was only a matter of when and how. This was not a case of finding ways in which one could avert war or finding ways in which one could disarm Saddam Hussein. We have all heard, and no one doubts it for a moment, that Saddam Hussein is in deed a monster committing genocide and crimes against humanity. One got the sense tonight that this war had already been cast in stone a very long time ago.
However, one does not despair for long. Tonight we have to regroup and we have to ask ourselves whether Canada can come up again with a plan and play a strong role in averting this war, albeit in 48 hours and albeit it at the eleventh hour. I think we can. I think we can come together and come up with ideas in which we can ensure that disarmament occurs. We can ensure that Saddam Hussein is forced to do the right thing. There are ways in which this can be done. We have to work with like-minded countries and we have to speed up our efforts to do so.
When I listened to Mr. Bush tonight, I remembered, and I was a very young girl, when President Kennedy faced a similar crisis and decided that he would indeed threaten war during the Cuban missile crisis. This was another American president at a time when America was the super power in the world, albeit with another super power, Russia. I remember that while the force, the ships, moved forward, we all waited with bated breath to see whether there would be a war. Indeed there was a very good reason for President Kennedy to move his ships into place. There was a real threat to America. Missiles were being set up in Cuba directed at the U.S., which is not what we see here today with regard to the United States and Saddam Hussein.
I recall then that even while Kennedy spoke of war, even while he clenched his fists very tightly and held them up and said, “We will not back down”, he was working behind the scenes constantly, as history tells us, with Russia and Mr. Khrushchev to see if, as men of goodwill, they could avert a war, to see war itself as a threat was not what they should use as a way of averting war, which is in itself an irony, using the threat of war to avert war. I think this is what one hoped would happen at the last moment here today.
I want to say clearly that we will see Canadians walk again. We will see them walking tomorrow probably. We will be getting letters. I know that my office will be inundated with phone calls because, as we heard tonight from my colleague from Mount Royal, Canadians believe in the rule of law and they believe international law must prevail. They believe the United Nations was set up to avert war and to ensure that no country unilaterally would make a pre-emptive strike. There are countries of the world that have known real war. France, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom have seen war in the two great wars. They like no one else understand what war is. They are all anxious even at this moment to avert war because they know that war does not solve the problem. War is a temporary measure.
If we wish to seek democratic solutions, if we wish to ensure disarmament, we must find a way to do so with a threat of force, yes with force, but to find the kind of process where we set clear guidelines and ensure that we exhaust all the efforts we need to exhaust, under the United Nations, to bring Saddam Hussein to heel.
I want to close by saying that, as a Canadian, I believe our government will stand up and do the right thing. I believe that in the history of Canada we have always at the right moment come up with ideas that are worth following. I hope that all of us in the House will not take petty political positions. This is too big. This is not a hockey game. I watched the media following Iraq as if it were a hockey game. Let us see who will be the first one, let us see who will get out there and deke out whom on the ice. This will be a crisis of humanitarian proportions, if war is launched on Iraq. This will last for a long time because there will be retaliation from many countries. The Middle East will be plunged into something unimaginable. This war has long term consequences.
Finally we need, and I think Canada can lead in this, to let men and women of goodwill move forward and to come up at this last moment with decisions under the rule of law and with compromises that would set clear guidelines to avert what would seem right now, in my sense of despair, to be an inevitability.