Mr. Speaker, perhaps I could just pick up on where the leader of the official opposition left off when he said that the NDP likes to target the good guy.
We are critical of the good guys because we do share their values and we want them to act according to the values that we share. We want the good guys to keep on being the good guys. We do not want them to act like the bad guys. That is called the prophetic perspective, by which many people over the centuries have been more critical of the people who share their values when those values are about to be departed from than they are in an active way of those who do not share their values in the first place.
I do not expect Saddam Hussein to be a good guy. I already know that Saddam Hussein is a bad guy. What we are disagreeing with here is how we deal with the bad guys and whether we deal with them in the way that the United States has proposed to do in this instance, through the instigation of a pre-emptive war that sets brand new precedence with respect to how international affairs are to be conducted. That is the debate here.
This is not a question of who is the good guy and who is the bad guy. We know who the bad guy is. The bad guy is Saddam Hussein. The question is how do we deal with that in a way that ensures the long term security and safety of the planet. That is the debate.
I make no apologies for the fact that the NDP and the CCF before it, and many others, have been willing to take whatever heat comes from the likes of the Leader of the Opposition by willing to be critical of our own side. It seems to me that we do not check our values in at the door whenever a war starts or whenever there is a conflict. We do not check our brains in or our values in. We keep those active and we are willing to be prophetically critical of our own side when we think it is doing something wrong. That, it seems to me, is the mark of true statesmanship and good politics, and that is what we are about here today.
I want to thank the Bloc for bringing forward the motion, but again express my regret that we do not have a government so confident in its own position that it would not come into the House, like Tony Blair did, albeit with a different position, put down a motion and have a debate. I have yet to see the Prime Minister deliver a speech of any length or substance with all his members around him supporting him in the way that other prime ministers have. Why can we not have that kind of debate in the House? Why does it have to be an opposition party that brings forward a debate in the course of these opposition day opportunities? Why could the government not have done that? It is an insult to Parliament. It betrays a lack of conviction on the part of the government with respect to its own position that it is unwilling to do this. It certainly does not do anything for the respect that Canadians have for Parliament to have the absence of that kind of occasion persist, even in the face of the circumstances that we now have before us.
Mr. Speaker, I want to indicate that I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Halifax.
It seems to me that we could have had a motion but I do not want to dwell forever on the procedural end of it, although I find the Bloc motion to be a bit odd in the sense that it calls on the government to do something which I think the government has already done. In that sense, I think it could have been better worded to have said that it affirms the government's decision to not participate in the war on Iraq. In any event, it is substantively the same and I certainly hope that the government intends to support the motion.
On a number of other occasions, when this kind of issue has been before the Canadian people, there have been votes in the House of Commons. I recall the gulf war, what might come to be called the first gulf war, when on three different occasions we had three different motions before the House, put forward by the Conservative government, on which we had debate and a vote. It seems to me that is the kind of thing that should have been emulated. The Prime Minister has emulated almost everything else that Brian Mulroney did. The one good thing that he did while he was here, the Prime Minister takes a pass on. It is unfortunate.
What we see here is the persistent ambiguity in the Prime Minister's position with respect to the possibility of a war in Iraq. I sometimes felt that the goal of the Liberal government was not so much to prevent a war on Iraq, but to make sure that the war on Iraq had the sanction of the United Nations.
The real failure, as the Liberals experience failure in this case, is not the failure to prevent a war but the failure to prevent a war not sanctioned by the UN.
When push came to shove, the Prime Minister had to choose, and I think he made the right decision, but it seems to me that the goals and aspirations characteristic of the government's behaviour leading up to that certainly were not the goals and aspirations that we shared on this side, because we saw the goal as not wanting to have a war in the first place.
This ambiguity persists. The Prime Minister and the Minister of Foreign Affairs are not willing to say that this war, by many authoritative accounts, is illegal. Why is the Prime Minister not willing to say that or to comment on whether he thinks it is illegal or not? Perhaps he thinks it is a legal war and there are other reasons why Canada should not be participating. Perhaps he thinks it is an illegal war and that is the reason Canada is not participating.
We have not had any of that kind of explanation from the government. It seems to me that Parliament and the Canadian people are owed that kind of explanation as to what is the reasoning behind the government's position.
We have more of this kind of ambiguity in the way that the Prime Minister has refused to be clear about how he intends to prevent the undermining of his own position. When I say the undermining of his own position I am speaking of the possibility that Canadian Forces now in the gulf region under the auspices of Operation Apollo may well be drawn into the war on Iraq.
Yesterday, for instance, I raised the issue of the Minister of National Defence being reported to have said that Canadian ships in the gulf might well escort American ships heading toward the theatre of war. I did not get a straight answer on that. Are Canadian ships operating in Operation Apollo forbidden from escorting ships into the theatre of war? If they are not, then it seems to me that this could very well be an inconsistency on the part of the government.
There is of course the very real, and I think already established inconsistency, of leaving Canadian officers, who are on exchange with American units, leaving them participating in those units, particularly when those units might be participating in the war on Iraq. Is the government not concerned about the integrity of its own position?
We are not asking the government to uphold the NDP position. We are asking the government to uphold its own position, that Canadian troops should not be part of the war on Iraq.
We are concerned that the Prime Minister, and it would not be the first time that the Prime Minister has tried to do this, is trying to have it both ways. He is trying to have the politics of not participating in the war on Iraq, and we applaud that decision, but at the same time we feel that the Prime Minister and Canada should not get away with undermining its own position by permitting circumstances that would have Canadian Forces in the gulf participating in the war on Iraq indirectly, either through surveillance aircraft that are providing information to the fifth fleet that is to be used in the war on Iraq, or our ships escorting American ships to the war on Iraq, or in the various other ways that we might become involved. We are very concerned about that as I know are the Bloc Quebecois, and others may be as well.
We ask the Prime Minister in this instance to be more clear and express to President Bush a broader criticism of the war than just non-participation. All the Prime Minister has offered so far is Canadian non-participation. We think that more is required of the Prime Minister in this case. Certainly what is required of the Prime Minister is that Canadian Forces not undermine what has been a good political decision in the best sense of the word “political”, not just in the partisan, pejorative or seeking political advantage sense of the word political, but a good political decision not be undermined by Canada surreptitiously or inadvertently participating in the war on Iraq.
We are now in the irony that Canada actually has more military forces in the gulf that are open to this kind of participation, although we hope not, in the war in Iraq than most of the other countries that have been listed as supporters of the war in Iraq. This is a situation that poses great danger for the integrity of the government's position and I urge the government to act on it.