Mr. Speaker, in a sense I think the last question is pretty naive. For instance, we know that terrorist organizations will attack targets of opportunity. They did in Bali, Indonesia. Terrorists do not just wander around looking to necessarily attack the United States everywhere they go. They attack their allies, which is what they did in Indonesia where they killed many Australians. I think we are naive if we think that cannot happen in Canada.
This would also benefit Canada. If someone were to point a weapon at Canada then obviously this system would knock that weapon down. The idea is to knock the weapon down before it gets to Canada.
I am not quite sure what the point was of the second question, the point about North Korea being rewarded because it built a nuclear weapon. I do not know that we could say that it is being rewarded, but the fact is that North Korea has built a nuclear weapon which, of course, is why, and the member is right, the United States was not going to march in and risk a nuclear conflict on the Korean peninsula. That would be ridiculous.
However the very fact that North Korea has that nuclear capacity should make us all nervous. We should be thinking of ways to prevent it from using that weapon. It does not mean that we no longer have diplomacy in the world. It does not mean that we do not use the United Nations to address these sorts of things. Of course we do, but we should not rely on them exclusively. If we place all our faith in those bodies I think we would be completely naive.
We should remember that no body that sits arm's length from a particular country can guarantee that the country will not fire a weapon at somebody else. Of course we would take measures on our own to protect our people. That is common sense.
With respect to the point about the weaponization of space and the point about influencing our friends, I ask my friend across the way to consult his own experience. When we work with people they have an influence on us. If people are opposed to us, if they are a gadfly, an annoyance, we do not really want to hear what they have to say. We ignore what they are saying and in fact sometimes we might do completely the opposite to annoy them back. That is human nature.
I would argue that if we sit and work with people and try to be constructive, we will accomplish things and influence those people. If my friend across the way doubts that, I ask him to consult his own experience and ask himself how it works in his own family. That is precisely how it has worked for 50 years with the United States before we began this period, under this Liberal government, of setting out, it seems like very often, to intentionally annoy our neighbours.