Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have an opportunity to comment further on the motion introduced by my colleague, the member for West Nova.
The previous speaker really hit the nail on the head in recognizing that the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre at Cornwallis in Deep Brook was a very important institution in the first instance.
There is a major concern which is widely shared not just by Canadians but by others who used to respect Canada as a meaningful peacekeeper and peace builder in the world as to whether Canada is seriously committed to that role any more. It is not a pretty picture what people draw about Canada in many parts of the world today. Those who watch closely see some of the contradictions in Canada's position, in that we bow to the peace altar, but what we actually do is a contradiction to what really needs to be done.
As this debate goes on in this place, the NPT PrepCom meetings are happening this week in Vienna. Canada will take part, as it has done again and again, in discussions about how we are going to prevent the world from annihilation through nuclear proliferation. Canada will say it is very much in support of the NPT. As a signator of the non-proliferation treaty, it commits us to serious abolition of nuclear weapons. However, at the same time Canada will be there waving the flag of NATO.
NATO and many countries in NATO are serious violators of the provisions of the NPT. By association and by being part of the NATO family, we become partners, and hypocrites really, in the exercise of saying we are serious about maintaining peace and literally the survival of the human race, but we are also signators to the many violations taking place among our partners in NATO.
It is sad but true that the previous Liberal government and now the current Conservative government have been quite prepared for the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre to be on life support since its inception. It was a brilliant, creative response to the closure of the Cornwallis base in the first instance to understand the desperate need for leadership in peacekeeping and peace building in the world today. We must recognize that the wiping out of 700 jobs is devastating to that economy. It was seen as a partnership and a coming together of interlocking needs to put forward this proposal.
I have to commend the original authors of that, who, in collaboration with the community, joined community needs with the government's responsibilities to put this forward. Erika Simpson and Peter Langille were very instrumental in this in the first instance.
What is sad is that the Auditor General within a year or two had already commented that the centre's long term viability was going to be very much in question. This was from a pure economic point of view. The previous Liberal government moved further and further away from taking any real responsibility not just for the economic viability of that centre, but for the integrity and the comprehensiveness of the peacekeeping and peace building mission that drove the vision in the first place.
Part of the backdrop that has unfolded has been sort of a Greek tragedy in a way for Canada and the world. Canada has been a major contributor to peacekeeping in the world. Canada used to be in the top 10 year after year, but Canada has now so eroded our commitment as participants in peacekeeping that we are now, I think, 57th among nations contributing to peacekeeping in the world.
Some people may say they have already heard the messages from Rick Hillier, from the finance minister and, I think by implication, from the Prime Minister that peacekeeping is not that important in the world anymore. Both of the previous speakers quite correctly pointed out that the original notion of peacekeeping as just maintaining a truce between two parties to an agreement has very much expanded into a broader notion of peace building in all of its complexity. The world has never been more desperate for leadership in this area.
It is a source of pride to Canadians, and if I may say so, particularly Canadian women, that the new head of the United Nations Peacebuilding Commission is a Canadian woman. She has had a distinguished career in public service with CIDA, with United Nations development programs, and ultimately in a tremendous demonstration and example of a meaningful, complex peace building process in Burundi.
We know there is more and more need for this. Why? Because most conflicts today cannot be solved by military means. There is a desperate need for a security element in peace building. What is absolutely clear, and we have heard it from our own Prime Minister, our own defence minister, and from Rick Hillier, the chief of the defence staff, is that in Afghanistan it is acknowledged that there is no military solution. What is needed is a comprehensive peace building process.
The reality is that the world is desperate for this kind of leadership. What did the previous Liberal government do? It started dismembering it, like a slow process of amputation. Fortunately the human body can sometimes survive amputations. We bring massive medical know-how to bear and the human body sometimes is able to respond to this kind of trauma. But the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre in Nova Scotia has not been surviving the systematic dismembering that has been happening, and the withdrawal of government support on anything but a commercial basis, and now the withdrawal of the needed economic support to have assured its long term viability.
I hope, at the very least in this minority government that maybe we could see some leadership. I hope that all parties could come together to say that we have to recommit to peacekeeping and to complex, comprehensive peace building in a serious way. There will be no solution to Afghanistan until we do that.
If I may, I would like to make a challenge to my colleagues from Nova Scotia, several of whom are in the House for this debate. At the very least I would hope across party lines that we could recognize that Nova Scotia could continue to be a leader in terms of peacekeeping and peace building, but it is going to require pulling together to make that happen.
In conclusion, it is a commentary on Canada's hypocrisy in the world today that we say on the one hand that we are really committed to the NPT, and on the other hand we say that we can be partners in NATO which is violating member countries' obligations left, right and centre.
Let us tackle this as a comprehensive issue, one of the great questions of our time. Let us do it perhaps by looking at some creative partnerships between the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre and the Pugwash Peace Exchange, which is now celebrating its 50th anniversary. The synergy between those two could put us on the map as meaning what we say about Canada being committed to peace building and peacekeeping in today's world.