Mr. Speaker, I present my remarks today in the light of a fairly recent revelation for us. As I am hearing it and I could be wrong, and maybe in the question and answer time we can be corrected on this, but my understanding is that the Liberals are going to bail out on their own former legislation. I hope we hear some clarification on that but these are the early indications that we are receiving. I hope that is not true.
It has some precedent because in a similar regard, it was under the Liberal regime that our troops, our brave men and women in uniform, were committed to Afghanistan and then it was Liberals by the scores who bailed out on our troops and voted against us maintaining our commitment to the good people of Afghanistan who have asked us to be there. This would not be surprising to me, but I hope that is not true.
We need to look at the genesis of this legislation, which was of course what happened on 9/11, and then the follow-up by the United Nations asking democratic nations to do what they could to enhance their legislation, to minimize the chance that this type of horrific event could happen again.
Now it appears that the logic, or the illogic, that is being applied to not extending these provisions that are in here to protect Canadians, is that everything is fine now. Nobody has blown up any Twin Towers since then. There has not been any attack in Canada. Could there be any thought that maybe the legislation has actually served as a deterrent? Would that ever come into account? It appears not.
I would remind my colleagues that Canada is still on Osama bin Laden's list. He named several countries which he was directing his malevolent forces to attack whenever they had the opportunity. Canada is still on that list.
Since 9/11, since the United Nations requested that countries do what they could to come up with legislative provisions to protect themselves in a greater way, we have seen ongoing terrorist attacks. The obvious ones that we can remember were the horrific events that happened in Beslan where schoolchildren were slaughtered by terrorists, of course the London underground incident, four trains bombed in Madrid, the night club in Bali where three Canadians were killed--