Mr. Speaker, with all due respect to the government House leader, I do believe that he is indeed, as his government has been trying to do ever since it made the decision not to participate in the ballistic missile defence agreement with the United States, trying to split hairs and is trying to make the agreement that we arrived at last October as vague as possible. At that time it was very clear that what we were talking about was any agreement.
Now I am assuming that there was some agreement among the cabinet and government members to not participate. However before they had made the agreement to do that the Prime Minister himself had made the commitment to put that before Parliament and to have a vote on it.
It is absolutely ridiculous that on an issue this important the government is trying to pretend that it can make an arbitrary decision not to participate and somehow that should not be debated but if it had come to the decision to participate, that would warrant a debate and a vote.