Mr. Speaker, I listened earlier this evening to some of the comments of fellow colleagues in this chamber. It is important for people back home to realize that one of the most fundamental questions we always ask on an endeavour like this is, why are we there?
I would boil it down to this. My colleague identified Afghanistan as having been a rogue state. Our purpose in many respects is to bring order to what was chaos. That is as simple an equation as I can boil this down to. I think it has tremendous value.
It is worthwhile for some of the people in this place, and those watching at home, to think of what prompted us to get into this.
I remember being phoned early on the morning of September 11. I watched the planes crash into the towers and the towers collapse. I personally had a friend who was working in downtown New York, and he still does, as an investment banker. He told me the story of walking north from those buildings, as the smoke poured out of them and as the emergency vehicles rushed in. He watched as people jumped from the upper stories of the World Trade Center. He used his shirt, his tie and various items of clothing to cover his mouth so he did not breathe in as much of the soot and the dust as what would have normally happened had he not shielded his lungs.
I was in New York one month after the towers collapsed. For the folks back home in Calgary, I want to paint this picture, and for members here I hope it will provide some sense of gravity of the situation.
We have the Petro-Canada tower in downtown Calgary. It was built when the government of Pierre Elliott Trudeau nationalized Petrofina, and it is not necessarily a loved institution in our city. Nonetheless, each tower of the two complexes of the World Trade Center was twice as wide and twice as tall as the Petro-Canada tower. Each of those towers therefore represented eight times the mass of the Petro-Canada tower. When those two buildings came down, that was 16 times the size of the Petro-Canada tower.
When I was there a month later, three blocks away from the epicentre of that destruction was police tape, and nobody but emergency workers were allowed to walk in that space. Then another two blocks beyond that, for a total of five blocks, no motorized were vehicles allowed. Therefore, an area of 10 blocks, 5 blocks each side all the way around, 10 blocks by 10 blocks, 100 square city blocks, was taken out and immobilized as a result of those towers collapsing.
It was not just those two towers. All the buildings surrounding them were heavily damaged or fully collapsed as a result of the debris that came down. Every street in every direction for as far as the eye could see, nose to nose, was lined with nothing but containers, massive dumpsters, the types of things we would imagine being loaded on the barge of a ship. The containers were full of nothing but debris. I do not know whether the debris was parts of buildings, or paper, or people.
In my city, that would represent an area in downtown Calgary from the Bow River, north of the city, right down to the railway tracks in the south, to the Beltline, and from basically the car dealerships in the west, right out to the East Village and Inglewood in the east. It would be the entirety of downtown Calgary that literally was immobilized and rendered useless as a result of the collapse of those towers.
I went there both a month afterward and two months afterward. When I stood three blocks away from that epicentre a month after that incident occurred, I stood there and I watched as the steam was still venting from the epicentre. That of course made sense because New York, being the highly civilized place that it is, with all the traffic and the people and the transit cars and the subway system, and everything else that is involved was built into the granite block that is Manhattan, and there were countless electrical and natural gas and other mains operating underneath the World Trade Center. There were fires still at 1000°C burning underground causing that venting and steam. That was still the case two months later when I visited. It was less, but it was still there in evidence.
So that, in a sense, boils down one kernel to why it was crucial for us to step in. We could not allow something like that to happen again without making our best possible effort to stem it.
Since that time, I have had the honour of having people come to visit my office who have personally lost loved ones as a result of these terrorist attacks.
I know that Senator Tkachuk, in the other place, has a bill that he is putting forward on this very issue.
I had a lady sit in my office here in the East Block on Parliament Hill. She wants us to change, in a sense, the justice system to allow her and others like her to pursue civil actions against terrorist fundraisers.