Mr. Speaker, 10 years ago today the world signed a treaty here in Ottawa to ban landmines. It was an extraordinary effort led by the international committee to ban landmines, civil society, the Liberal government of the day and other MPs. The result is that casualties have dropped from 27,000 to 5,700 a year, hundreds of thousands of acres have been demined, and stockpiles have been destroyed.
As a country we must now move toward a ban on cluster bombs, lead a small arms and light weapons registry internationally, invest in demining, and back up our responsibility to protect with an obligation to act so that we have an enforcement mechanism to back up our judicial mechanism.
In the 1990s Canada had an inspired foreign policy, a courageous foreign policy that brought us the landmines ban, the International Criminal Court, and the responsibility to protect. We need to get back to that courageous foreign policy where we put protection of civilians at the centre of our foreign policy and worked toward international peace.