Mr. Speaker, I am not shocked and dismayed, because the Conservatives behave this way almost all the time.
The first thing I want to say is, is this really the single, most important thing that is facing Canada right now? The government decides that issues of trade with Panama, with Honduras, with Colombia are the most important thing and therefore we need to limit debate so we cannot talk about it any longer.
The Conservatives have done the same thing with the bill. They have decided that we are not going to talk about this anymore. They are done talking. In fact, members opposite are done talking completely. They have decided that their constituents' voices have now been heard by the bill, and that all of the members opposite, all of their constituents, how many of them voted for them, are now in possession of the complete truth, the facts, and everything else about the bill and there is no need to express their views. There is no need for those members opposite to express the wishes of their constituents, because the bill does that for them. Therefore they do not need to talk about what their constituents might be saying to them. I think their constituents might be saying a lot. They certainly are to me.
Canada is a peaceful country. It always has been. When war happens and sometimes in faraway places, Canada responds to war efforts by other countries that require our assistance, World War I, World War II, Korea. We have been, regrettably, in Afghanistan. There were a number of Canadians soldiers who did not come back alive. In each of those circumstances, with the possible exception of Afghanistan, we were doing something for the greater good.
We are now suggesting, through kind of a sideways glance and loophole in a bill, that it is okay to kill and maim children, women, and other civilians who have no part in a war, that it is okay by our inaction on the bill, to build weapons and to use them, not by Canada, but by our allies, in theatres of war. Canadians can join in this war, Canadian soldiers can be part, wherever this war takes place. Our allies cannot expect Canada to tell them we are not going unless they stop using these particular weapons.
That is what we on this side of the House want to have happen. That is what we on this side of the House believe that my constituents want Canada to stand for. We want Canada to stand for the creation of a peaceful planet, not one where women and children have to fear that bombs will drop on them from the sky, and tiny bombs at that, bombs that are not designed as a weapon of war, but as a weapon of destruction of civilians.
The U.S. has become really good with their little drones that can go out and pick off an individual who happens to be a leader in another country. Maybe that is where weapons of war are going, to the individual hit, but this cluster munition is not a weapon of war. It is a weapon of destroying as many lives as it can. We might as well say that biological weapons are okay or chemical weapons are okay, as long as it is somebody else using them. As long as we are just beside them and somebody else is using them, then it is okay to use them. We will participate. We will join in with allies who use these things.
I do not think my constituents want me to take that position. I do not believe that this side of the House can support a bill that allows that to take place. It does not do everything, including refusing to stand alongside a country, even if we agree with the fight, if they intend to use these, if they have not signed this treaty.
We have, over the past century probably, discovered ways to kill people that we did not know of before, and we have used them in war. We are a pretty sophisticated species, we human beings. We have decided to put rules around war that limit the destruction to those involved in the war. Killing soldiers is okay. Killing children is not.
I am not going to get into a philosophical debate about whether war is good, bad, or indifferent, but we have developed a number of treaties and conventions over the past century or so that limit damage to civilians secondary to the cause of the war itself. There is a whole great long list of them.
There is the African Nuclear-Weapon-Free-Zone Treaty, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that is designed to prevent one side from developing ways of stopping nuclear weapons from raining down on them, the Arms Trade Treaty that Canada refused to sign, the Biological Weapons Convention, the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, the Convention on Cluster Munitions, which is the one we are talking about now.
There is the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the International Code of Conduct Against Ballistic Missile Proliferation, the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America, the Limited Test Ban Treaty, the Mine Ban Treaty, otherwise known as the Ottawa treaty, because Canada had a lot to do with developing that treaty and actually hosted the convention. We saw land mines as being such a cruel and unusual form of conducting a war that we wanted the rest of the world to agree that land mines should be banned.
There is the Missile Technology Control Regime, the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the Treaty on Open Skies, the Outer Space Treaty, the Peaceful Nuclear Explosions Treaty, the Seabed Arms Control Treaty. There are about 15 more that have to do with nuclear weapons, which have been used on this planet, much to the shame of some of the scientists who discovered what they had developed.
We on this side of the House believe, as I think many in the rest of the world do, that if there are wars, we should limit the damage by those wars. Most wars nowadays are over oil, but most wars are over somebody's decision about where a boundary should be, as is going on currently in the Ukraine, where one country has decided to quietly feed a bunch of weapons to another group of people who want to take a piece of that country and move the boundary. War should not include the kinds of weapons that destroy lives without regard for the fact of whether a person is wearing a uniform or not. We on this side of the House believe that those kinds of weapons do not belong in anything that Canada does with its soldiers, period, end of story.
There is a personal message from my side of the House. My wife's cousin, who is a medical professional in Edmonton, has had first-hand experience with the effects of these munitions in third world countries. His job is to build prosthetics. He has spent several years of his life on the other side of the planet teaching doctors and others how to build prosthetics for children and how to keep growing those prosthetics as the children grow. It is a very sad, awful thing to have to do, but that is the effect of weapons like this. The effect is that children grow up without limbs and children need prosthetics in countries that do not have a lot of money to begin with. Are we sending prosthetics to these countries? No. Are we accepting refugees from these countries? Sometimes, but it is very difficult to get a straight answer out of the current minister on how many.
In general, we are glad that the Conservatives have actually agreed to ratify this treaty, but we hope that they would agree with us to remove the giant loopholes that we could drive a tank through and agree that our job should be to limit, not be a party to, the use of these weapons.
