Mr. Speaker, perhaps the obvious place for me to pick up is with the two questions that I put to the previous member, both of which were avoided or evaded in his answers.
On the issue of citing a poll that says seven out of ten Canadians support Canada's participation in Bush's missile defence, there was an undertaking by the member's foreign affairs critic that this poll would be tabled. It has not been done. We all know, first of all, that something that is as absolutely fundamentally important as this issue should surely not hinge on polls.
Secondly, the citing of polling information requires a full understanding of what the questions were and therefore what it was that Canadians expressed themselves on. So far there has been an extreme reluctance by the official opposition to table the poll, which the member for Okanagan--Coquihalla said he had in his possession and would table. I again would ask that the House be respected and the commitment that was made be actually carried out.
I want to go further today in the brief time available to me, because I intend to split my time with the hard-working member for Windsor West. I want to pursue two brief issues.
One of those issues is the steadfast refusal of the Liberal government in office and of the official opposition, the Conservative opposition, to acknowledge the extensive evidence, the overwhelming preponderance of evidence, that what we are here agreeing to become part of, to participate in, is indeed one stage in an intended process to lead to a militarization and a weaponization of space.
I want to further ensure that there is on the public record not the sugar-coating and, I would have to say, just misrepresentation about what is contained in the letter from our Canadian defence minister to the U.S. defence secretary.
I just want to make sure that Canadians understand what that letter actually says. It actually makes it clear, and I will quote: “the objective of including Canada as a participant in the current U.S. missile defence program...”. It goes on to make it clear that this is intended to, and I quote: “help pave the way for increased government-to-government and industry-to-industry cooperation on missile defence...”.
I do not know what purpose is served by the government sticking its head in the sand. Actually I do not believe it did stick its head in the sand; I want to take that back. Because if I thought it was sticking its head in the sand, then I would think that maybe it is not actually willing to look at the evidence. But I do not believe for a moment that it has not seen the evidence. That is why it is very difficult not to come to the conclusion that there is wilful misrepresentation of the facts taking place.
The facts speak for themselves when we read the letter that went from the minister of defence to Rumsfeld. If the letter itself was not cause for concern, what became an even greater cause for concern was the hypocrisy and the duplicity of the letter saying one thing, utterly devoid of a single reference to Canadian opposition to the weaponization or militarization of space, while the press release that the minister put out in a kind of afterthought and a footnote said, for the home crowd, “By the way, this is really what it seemed like, we are kind of opposed to weaponization of space but we are not putting it in the letter”.
This has simply underscored the concerns of Canadians on this point. In case there is any possibility that anybody on the government side or the official opposition side, who absolutely share the same point of view here, is not in command of the research materials that are available, let me just say that there is no shortage of direct statements by George Bush, by Donald Rumsfeld, and by Paul Wolfowitz and others that make it clear that weaponization of space is part of what this is about.
It was not just Lloyd Axworthy, the former foreign affairs minister, it was not just the highly respected Order of Canada recipient, Nobel laureate John Polanyi, who appeared before the defence committee to say this is like climbing onto a conveyor belt to the weaponization of space. It is the very people in the U.S. administration who are making these decisions and who have not just acknowledged that, but have laid it out as part of their plan.
Let me just briefly quote from one such statement. Rumsfeld's deputy Paul Wolfowitz confirmed the Bush administration's ambitions to see weapons in space become part of its multi-layered concept of missile defence. Here is the quote:
...while we have demonstrated that hit-to-kill works, as we look ahead we need to think about areas that would provide higher leverage. Nowhere is that more true than in space. Space offers attractive options not only for missile defence but for a broad range of interrelated civil and military missions. It truly is the ultimate high ground.
We are exploring concepts and technologies for space-based intercepts.
I mentioned in debate the day before yesterday that my leader, who is doing tremendous work on this issue, and I had a day and a half in Washington last week. I noticed that the former defence minister stood up and said he did not know why the NDP is not willing to acknowledge that actually it was not George Bush who first signed on to the next stage of missile defence research; it was the Clinton administration in 1999.
That is absolutely true. I have to say that I think it is one of the most worrisome things about what is going on here. There are courageous, far-sighted and peace-loving members of the Democratic Party who are in Congress and the Senate who support the position that Clinton took in 1999. There are also a great many who very much regret that this was done. Do members know why? Because the Bush administration has seized this fact of the limited agreement in 1999, providing for research around sea based and land based missile defence; it has been seized with glee, not surprisingly, by the Bush administration to say, “Let us get right back on track with our original plan, the Bush I plan, which did include weaponization of space”.
What was very alarming was to hear the descriptions from U.S. Congress member after member with whom we met, as well as representatives of the NGOs, that it is like the case of the emperor who has no clothes. It is like a situation where everybody now knows that the notion of land based and sea based missile defence has not been properly tested. The limited testing that has been done has found it wanting. Most sophisticated scientists agree that it is not a system that would work, can work or will work. But we need to get through that stage, to put aside the normal testing requirements, which is what the Bush administration has done. It has abandoned the normal testing requirements so that it can ramp up and accelerate its commitment to go to the next layer of space based militarization. That is what is being acknowledged.
What disallows this government and the Conservative opposition from acknowledging this? Actually, Conservative opposition is more and more an oxymoron in this House, because we do not have a Conservative opposition to the Liberal government anymore. We have a conservative Liberal administration and a Conservative opposition that actually applauds and embraces most of the new and not so liberal conservative plans coming from the new Liberal government. That is what we have going on. But what is it that prevents them from acknowledging that this has more to do with the financial interests of the military-industrial complex? It has more to do with a militaristic approach to dominance of the world than it has to do with any defence from realistic threats.
Who is it that our government and the U.S. government are so convinced will launch sophisticated, highly expensive missiles on Canada for which this system will be the appropriate defence? Who is the threat? Who is the enemy? Who is causing us to become implicated in a system that could potentially, as estimated by a good many experts, cost as much in the end as $1 trillion to escalate the arm's race, to make the world a less safe and secure place, and result in the weaponization of space, which both of those parties pretend to oppose?
If they actually do oppose weaponization of space, why do they not at least have the honesty, decency and integrity to say that they acknowledge it is about the weaponization of space, that there is evidence of it and that they agree to go to the table because they think it is terrifying and that they had better be there to fight against the implementation of the U.S. plans to weaponize space? That would be a position of some integrity.