Mr. Speaker, I listened to a good portion of the hon. member's comments and I appreciate where he is coming from with respect to his support for the motion. Frankly, I support the motion as well. However some aspects of the motion are somewhat unclear.
I will be voting for the motion but I think some aspects of it which are unclear could be improved, with perhaps a little bit of doctoring, to the point where a lot more members in the House could support it. I am referring specifically to the wording in the motion where it says “any system developed to defend North America against ballistic missiles”.
That does have some implications. Some people have read space based weapons into this. One could also, I suppose, go back to the 1960's system that we had in the country in terms of dealing with the old bomber threat where we had Bomack missiles that were tipped with nuclear warheads. We would not want to see a nuclear tipped warhead anti-ballistic missile system. I do not think anybody on any side of the House would like to see that sort of thing happen.
Would the hon. member perhaps make a suggestion to the mover of the motion that what we should be looking at in terms of possible changes to the wording would include something to the effect that: --and support giving Norad responsibility for the command of the proposed ground based anti-ballistic missile system developed to defend North America against ballistic missiles, or something along those lines?