Mr. Chair, we are here tonight to discuss a topic of great importance, the security of Canadians. It is a topic of deep importance, one which will enhance our security, one in which we seek to determine what is the best way to assure the defence of our people in our territory. It is also a subject about which there has been a great deal of misunderstanding and even misinformation, hence the importance of this debate.
What we are trying to do, and what we are presently engaged in with our discussions with the United States, is to determine how we can best assure the security of our country in the North American continent. In so doing, we will ensure that the best interests of Canada and Canadians will be protected. If we determine that the results of the discussions we are entering into are not in those interests, there is no need to sign any agreement with our American colleagues. However, we owe it to each other and to those we represent to engage in these discussions, and we owe it to ourselves to be accurate about what is at stake.
We have a long, outstanding cooperation with the United States in matters of defence. Any suggestion that entering into discussions with the United States about a defensive measure of this nature represents a shift in Canadian foreign policy, I would suggest to the House is completely misleading. On the contrary, it represents a continuation of a policy that has served us well for over 60 years.
In 1940 the Ogdensburg declaration, which President Roosevelt came here to enter into with Prime Minister Mackenzie King, committed our two countries to join together in the defence of North America. They established the Permanent Joint Board on Defence. Out of that came the agreement founding Norad, the North American Aerospace Defence Command.
Norad has been the foundation of defence cooperation between our two countries since that time. Since 1958, Canadians and Americans have been working side by side in ensuring aerospace defence of North America, the command decisions shared at every level by citizens of both our countries.
When I visited Norad, I was extremely proud to see our serving servicemen there working beside their American colleagues with no distinction as to who was American and who was Canadian, doing their jobs and working together for the security of North America. That, I would suggest to the House, is the model that we want to achieve as we go forward in our relations with the United States, but also as we consider what is the best way to guarantee our security.
Since 9/11, we have been active with the United States in looking at other ways to determine our security. We have established a binational planning group which looks to ways in which we can collaborate on many issues of joint security matters. We have established the joint smart border plan, which looks to the ways in which we manage our border in our relations with our American colleagues, guaranteeing both ease of access to the United States and ensuring security at the same time. We have even established integrated border enforcement teams. That is what I believe is the tradition we are building on as we now consider working with our American colleagues and discussing this issue.
Colleagues, this is not a question about a loss of sovereignty, as some have proposed. Canadians want closer cooperation with the United States in matters of security, but they also want our continued sovereignty, and that is what this discussion is about. That is why we are going into this discussion, the Minister of National Defence and myself on behalf of the government, with an assurance that we will enhance the security of our people, and we will only enter into it after we have learned all about it and have determined that it is in the best interests of Canadians.
We need to be perfectly clear what this is all about and what it is not about. It is not, contrary to the suggestions largely from the NDP, about star wars. Star wars was a strategic defence initiative proposed by President Reagan back in the 1980s. The star wars plan did contain plans for a huge number of space-based missile interceptors. It was designed to counter the threat of a massive attack from the entire nuclear arsenal of the Soviet Union as it was then.
Since then, both the nature of the defence system and its wider context are different. The international climate is different. Agreement has been entered into with Russia in which mutual assurances have been given, and there is no suggestion that this plan has anything to do with measures against Russia, or destined against Russia, China or other states of that nature.
It has been suggested that this is about Canada eventually getting involved in putting weapons into space. There is a suggestion out there that there is an inevitability of this leading to the weaponization of space.
We have to be straightforward. The idea of weapons in space has been discussed by certain voices in the United States, but is this policy for U.S. missile defence? No, it is not. There is no inevitability to this trend. In fact the trend is in the other direction.
As recently reported, the Missile Defense Agency has requested a relatively small amount of funds to research a space based test bed. It is not being advanced. It has been pushed back from 2008, in the minds of their planners, to 2012 and there is far from any guarantee that it will be approved by congress at any time. As put by a disappointed U.S. observer, “a program without adequate funding is not a vision, it's an hallucination”. Therefore, let us not be hallucinating over star wars when it does not exist.
I suggest that the weaponization of space is as controversial within the United States as it is within Canada. The cost and technological challenges of it are immense. Therefore, what matters for this debate and our decision is that our participation in the weaponization of space is not something that Canada will be a part of nor that the Minister of National Defence or myself envisage being involved in.
The missile defence program the U.S. is launching involves only land and sea-based interceptors. That is what it is and that is what we are discussing with the Americans.
Moreover, we do not envisage enormous costs for Canada. No financial contribution has been asked of us and we shall not commit to this program unless we can afford the cost.
Also, it will not lead to an arms race. Today we see a growing proliferation of ballistic missiles and that is a real threat for Canadians. This system, which is exclusively a defensive system, has no offensive capability. The interceptors must prevent the arrival of hostile missiles. How can that contribute to the arms race?
Furthermore, the scope of our security initiatives has not changed. We have no thought nor intention of abandoning our policies of protection against terrorism and in favour of human security. In all these areas, action must continue. We have no intention of substituting this particular defence for any others.
In closing, I want to assure the House that non-proliferation arms control and disarmament remain pillars of our foreign policy. Canada remains as a signatory and proponent of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, the missile technology control regime, the Hague code of conduct on ballistic missiles, the biological and toxin weapons convention, the chemical weapons convention, the G-8 global partnership against the spread of weapons and materials of mass destruction, and we continue to work with other states to make these measures more effective.
We recently joined the proliferation security initiative which seeks to deny and restrict the flow of weapons of mass destruction around the world.
When we hear from members of the opposition to this measure, all I ask of them is to stick to the facts. The facts are these. The missile defence program we are discussing with the United States is not about star wars. It is not about the weaponization of space. It does not represent an abandonment of Canadian commitment to peacekeeping and disarmament and multilateral arms control measures. It does not represent a shift in government spending priorities on security as a whole or in our overall priorities.
The United States is committed to developing this program. There are those who say in this House that if we join the Americans, we will be contributing to the decision to make this happen. There is no fact in that. It is going to happen whether we participate or not.
What we need to do is discuss it with our American partners and ascertain whether there is a way in which we can participate that increases the security of Canadians and is consistent with our commitment to disarmament and the containment of weapons of mass destruction. That is what the Minister of National Defence and myself propose to do.
We and the United States are closely linked together in many ways: in geography, through families, through trade and the environment. However, in matters of the defence of North America, we are particularly linked. It has been said we are like Siamese twins.
We therefore are called upon to search in every way we can to guarantee the safety of our citizens. We owe it to our American colleagues with whom we share this North American space to discuss such measures. That is what the government is doing in this case. It will discuss, analyze and determine if this is in the best interest of Canada and Canadians. There is nothing more at stake here and nothing less.