Mr. Speaker, we share a North American continent with a global superpower: our American friends with whom we share many foundational democratic principles and with whose economy ours is intimately and intricately intertwined.
Although we share many of the same values as our American friends, there have been times in history when we fundamentally disagreed with our American friends on issues of human rights, human dignity and especially on issues of war and peace. In fact, during those times there have been Americans who have disagreed with their own government, with their president, their commander-in-chief, and made the very difficult personal decision of uprooting their lives on a matter of principle and heading to the Canadian north to seek sanctuary in Canada.
It goes as far back as the Loyalists who headed north to Canada because they wished to stay loyal to the Crown. We provided them with refuge. Blacks escaping slavery through the Underground Railroad sought sanctuary in southern Ontario where they built new lives and enjoyed freedom.
More recently, during our lifetimes, there have been wars in Vietnam and in Iraq. There have been resisters to those particular wars who have once again uprooted themselves and have come seeking sanctuary in Canada. They fundamentally disagreed with their president's doctrine, as did Canadian prime ministers of that time. They disagreed with the doctrine of U.S. presidents, such as Nixon and Bush, who believed that one could bring democracy to middle powers half a world away through the barrel of a gun, to countries that had no traditions or institutions of democracy.
Over the past few years, as Iraqi war resisters landed in Canada, they expected the same treatment as Vietnam war resisters received two generations ago, that they would be given refuge in Canada. Unfortunately, prime ministers have changed since Canada's decision to not engage in the Iraq war. It is no longer the Right Hon. Jean Chrétien, whose greatest legacy will be his resistance to bringing Canada into the Iraq war. He was a prime minister who did not listen to President Bush's embellished evidence that there were weapons of mass destruction, which was later found to be false. Instead, he listened to the UN inspectors who said that there were no weapons of mass destruction. He resisted President Bush's arm-twisting, who said that the war was about freedom and democracy and that Saddam Hussein was a tyrant, a monster and a crook.
However, there are many tyrants and monsters.