Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with my colleague from Lac-Saint-Jean—Saguenay.
It is with great sadness that I rise today because, last night, an illegal, immoral and illegitimate war began. It is a sad moment in the history of mankind. People all around the world are sad and many of them are worried.
In the last few weeks, I had the opportunity to meet people, including students at the École Arc-en-ciel in Lac-Saint-Charles, at the Polyvalente de Charlesbourg and at the Polyvalente Le Sommet. They told me: “Mr. Marceau, do whatever you can to prevent this war from happening. We do not want this war”. These young people said spontaneously, and not because they were prompted to do so by teachers or by some school board employee, that they were worried and that they wanted to avoid this war.
But, unfortunately, the war has begun. These students asked me: “What can you do as a member of Parliament? What influence do you have on this issue”? Unfortunately, I had to tell them that the government, through lack of leadership, refused to put this issue to a vote in the House. Considering what is at stake here, parliamentarians should have been given the opportunity to vote on this issue in the House.
The government should have taken the lead and given the hon. members the opportunity to vote on this issue. But they did not. It is only thanks to the Bloc Quebecois that the elected members of Parliament have the opportunity to officially express their opinion on this war, by voting on this motion. Of course, we should have held that vote before the start of the war. But again, because of a lack of leadership, that vote did not take place.
The Prime Minister said that Canada would not participate in the hostilities, and we commend him for this. However, if we are to be consistent and logical, we need to take action to avoid being caught in the middle of this, which could very well happen. We have ships in the Persian Gulf and some of our troops, taking part in exchange programs with the U.S. and the British armed forces, are also over there. What this means is that troops with the Canadian flag on their uniforms will be called upon to take part in the war against Irak, even though the government has said that Canada would not participate in that war. This is not logical.
It is crucial that the government recall our troops who are currently in the Persian Gulf, so that Canada will not be called upon to play an indirect role in a war that the people and the members of Parliament consider illegal, immoral and illegitimate.
The only invasion that should have happened in Iraq is an invasion of inspectors. With more inspectors and more time, we could have avoided this whole mess.
When we talk about war and dead people, be they soldiers, civilians, men, women or children, we are talking about waste and damage.
There should have been more inspectors and more time. Unfortunately, since the American government had probably decided from the beginning to take military action, this did not happen.
Now that this conflict has begun, the Government of Canada must insist on a cessation of hostilities. It must insist on this to avoid more lives being lost.
At the conclusion of the most terrible conflict in the history of humankind, the second world war, the world created an instrument, however imperfect—it was created by men and women and is thus imperfect by its very nature—and that instrument was the UN.
The UN was created to prevent such situations from ever happening again. The world created the UN to avoid pre-emptive wars, to ensure that might no longer made right and that conflicts would be solved in a peaceful and legal way, and no longer by force.
With the beginning of hostilities, unfortunately, the instrument that the world created, the UN, has suffered a serious blow.
Other solutions besides war would have been possible. Any unilateral action, any pre-emptive war is an illegal action. It is a breach of international law. However, the interpretation of the countries that initiated the strikes might be this. Martin Wolfe, of the Financial Times , summarized international law as seen by the Americans as follows:
The supreme law is the security of the republic—
We are talking here about the American republic. Too bad if the search for absolute security for the Americans means that others must live in absolute insecurity.
How dangerous it would be if this notion of international law won out over the multilateral and international approach, which should be the one guiding us today.
The beginning of hostilities will probably have consequences not only for Iraqi civilians and for Iraq itself, but also for the neighbouring regions. Several states are very unstable in the Middle East. The conflict between Israel and Palestine is still an open sore.
I am at a loss for words, and this does not happen very often. Because of these people who will die, probably by the thousands, and because of this destabilization of a situation that is already serious in the Middle East, this is not an auspicious day for humankind. It saddens me.
I will conclude by saying that it also saddens me that the government chosen by Canadians did not at least show leadership and allow parliamentarians in this House to vote before the beginning of hostilities to justify its refusal to take part in the conflict.