Mr. Speaker, this evening we are considering a bill sponsored by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Bill C-6, An Act to implement the Convention on Cluster Munitions. I have a few preliminary remarks to make before commenting specifically on it.
This week, we have been sitting late into the evening to debate in haste bills that the Conservative government wants to push through. However, this bill was introduced in the House on December 6, 2012. The Conservatives then took six months to bring it to the debate stage. Once that was done, they imposed time allocation on us to limit debate, and now they have started up again with the same bill one year later.
The Conservatives often accuse us of hypocrisy and wanting to delay legislation, but it is they who constantly diminish democracy by forcing Parliament’s hand. I would point out that we are on our 64th time allocation motion and the Conservatives have a majority. They therefore control the agenda.
In these circumstances, they have convened a botched debate on a bill as debatable as Bill C-6. Here we see all the consideration the Conservatives have for world affairs: they legislate hastily late at night before thinned ranks.
It is as though regulating the production and purchase of cluster munitions did not merit having the Conservatives devote a little more time to it. The reason for this haste is obvious: they have no desire to give Canadians any way of realizing that the bill before us serves no other purpose than to prevent the application of the convention is supposed to implement.
This legislative step backward will have definite consequences that everyone here must know in his or her soul and conscience before approving the principle of it. I can state right away that this backtracking from our desire to regulate cluster munitions will mean death, suffering and blood.
The Conservative members who speak after me will naturally say I am exaggerating. They will pretend they want to pass the bill precisely in order to prevent my prediction from coming true. However, we members of the NDP do not hide behind empty words. We do not call deregulation reform or a step backward progress. We look at the reality head-on.
I see the reality of cluster munitions and conventional weapons every time I visit the two Royal Canadian Legions in my riding. I encounter that reality every Remembrance Day. It is written in every wound of every veteran who lost an arm, a leg or a hand in combat. The reality of cluster munitions is terribly cruel.
These bombs were used for the first time during World War II. Since then, they have been used on all battlefields, including the most recent ones in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan. These weapons were designed to disperse explosive submunitions over a small area.
Their effect is devastating. No one can escape. They cause indiscriminate harm to anyone and anything in their area. Their failure rate makes cluster munitions particularly dangerous for civilians: 30% do not explode when they hit the ground. They wait patiently for their victims, who continue to be maimed or killed years and even decades after the war has ended.
It is astounding that 98% of the victims of cluster munitions are civilians and 40% of them are children, a proportion that is heart-stopping. In addition to the wounds they cause, cluster munitions contaminate arable land, kill livestock and destroy shelters, permanently impeding economic recovery and development.
In keeping with its humanitarian tradition and its initiatives in terms of disarmament and conventional arms control, Canada signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions in 2008. In doing so, it made a commitment not to develop, produce, acquire, sell, stockpile, retain or transfer cluster munitions. By signing the convention, Canada also made a commitment to destroy all cluster munitions in its possession within eight years.
Canada’s signing of the convention committed it to providing assistance to the victims of cluster munitions and the other states parties to the convention. It was also to take all the necessary legislative measures to have the text adopted in its domestic law, which is why we are here this evening. At the time, we had underlined the signing of the convention as progress in keeping with Canada’s humanitarian tradition and duty.
If Bill C-6 were nothing but that, we would pass it with no hesitation. However, as it always does, the Conservative government has distorted the spirit of the law. The text it has put before us today reneges on the commitment it made yesterday. As always happens with the Conservatives, the devil is in the details. The details in this text are terrible. They include a loophole in the ban on using cluster munitions. The key word is “interoperability”. By including this word in the bill, even though we have signed the ban on cluster munitions, we could use them anyway. This means that the convention that we signed is undermined by the government’s action.
The testimony of those who negotiated the convention supports this view. The lead negotiator, Earl Turcotte, said in writing about this bill that “the proposed Canadian legislation is the worst of any country that has ratified or acceded to the convention, to date”. Former Australian prime minister Malcolm Fraser said it was “a pity the current Canadian government, in relation to cluster munitions, does not provide any real lead to the world. Its approach is timid, inadequate and regressive”.
Once again, Canada is content to be at the bottom of the class. That makes me sad for my country. However, experts, international figures and NDP members are not the only ones who are saying that this is a bad bill. On June 11, the defence minister at that time acknowledged that this was true. He said that the bill was not perfect and that it should be amended. It still has enormous deficiencies. It must be reviewed before it can be passed. I sincerely hope this will convince the Conservative members to listen for once to those who do not share their opinion rather than persisting in blindly passing anything and everything.
As for me, given the suffering of the victims of these abominable weapons, the destruction they cause and my duty toward humanity, I will refuse to support this bill, which, in its present form, contradicts and undermines the international treaty that it is supposed to implement and ratify.