Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise and speak to a subject to which I wish we never had to speak. Last night I watched the short one liner by the spokesperson for the President of the United States who came on television to say that the disarmament of Iraq had begun. We are in it. It is underway. We have started.
I will move to the comments made by the member for Lac-Saint-Louis, who said that the government has been involved with this and it has tried really hard to build a bridge. That is true. It did try to build a bridge, but it was at the very end.
The problem is that the government was invisible for the first six months of this operation. We should have been involved from the very beginning, trying to influence some of these decisions and directions where other parties went that are now active in this war.
If we turned on the television we could see the position of Belgium, Portugal and Spain, but we never saw the position of Canada unless it was changing one direction or the other night by night. The problem is Canada was invisible.
However now we have another opportunity and we should not be invisible. We should be very active in helping the countries that will be involved in the restructuring to develop a plan to reconstruct the country and provide aid to the people who will starve. As one member of our committee pointed out this morning, 16 million people in Iraq will be depending on government services for food and medicine. They have no access to that food and medicine and no one is there to help them.
We can play a role here. We missed the first part of this. We were not involved in developing policy. We can be involved right now and we should be. Every indication is that we once again are invisible.
Right from the very beginning we said that we would follow the United Nations and respect the United Nations resolution 1441 and that we would do everything we could to see that the parties complied with it. We directly communicated with senior leaders in Iraq to encourage and demand that they comply with 1441. We went as far as we could go to convince them to do that.
Resolution 1441 is the unanimous resolution that engaged Hans Blix and his weapons inspectors to go to Iraq, do their job, complete their job and report back to the United Nations with a final report. The Security Council was authorized to take steps then and only then, and no one else. We still support that. We think Hans Blix should still be there and should still be allowed to complete his job for the very people that supported the resolution in the first place. All the countries that supported him in the first place should continue their support and allow them to continue. However, that is gone now. It is over. Hans Blix and the weapons inspectors are gone.
The awful thing is that there was an agreement by all countries about the problem. There was probably even a consensus on the eventual strategy, if necessary. The problem is in the way it was invoked and in the way it was approached: no consensus was sought or found. Now we find ourselves in a split world which, to me, was unnecessary in many ways.
I do not believe the war has to be now. There should not be a war and there should not be the split in the international community. There could have been a consensus on a strategy if the countries on both sides of this debate had been just a little flexible. However they were not flexible and here we are with a split world, a split United Nations and a very dangerous situation.
Once again I will say that we were invisible in the beginning of this process and we should not have been. We should have been involved from the beginning, trying to encourage the British, the Americans and other countries involved to restructure their proposal and seek a consensus but we were invisible.
We should not be invisible now. We should be very active in helping the people. We should be very active in helping to formulate the procedure to reconstruct and help the people of Iraq.
I hope the government will be very active and proactive in that field and take a leadership role, and not be invisible again.