Mr. Chair, I thank the hon. member for his many long years of service as a fighter pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force. I thank him very much for that.
I have seen this movie before. My parents, in fact, have seen this movie before. My father could tell us about this movie from the inside of a gulag. This is something that is recurring in history. Vladimir Putin is also a historian. He studies Stalin, he understands Stalin, and he is refining his methods. He is drifting very quickly back to Russia's totalitarian communist past. This should be disturbing to us all.
This is somebody who is pressing our borders again, since the Cold War, be it the overflights over our Arctic, the overflights over Baltic space, the overflights over NATO members. It is a violation and something that is provocative and threatening global peace and security where it never had to be or should have been.
Vladimir Putin has personal ambitions to recreate an empire of his own and we are not going to allow him to do that. Canada and its allies are going to stand firm in the face of Mr. Putin and all of us are going to enjoy the freedom, democracy, human rights and rule of law that all of our nations have earned over 70-plus years of having to deal with the communist system.