Mr. Speaker, I would simply put it in another fashion. The member started by speaking of the intention of this motion and this committee. However, one of the things that I think every one of us should do here, as policy makers, is ask, “What are the potential unintended effects?” We all know what the intention is, but what are the potential unintended effects?
One of the things I used to teach my students, when I was teaching at U of T, was that every time they make a policy decision, they need to think about the unintended effects. We all know what we want to do, but what are the things we are going to cause to happen that we do not want to do? If we tax windows, do we end up with houses with really tiny windows? That is what happened in Great Britain many years ago.
We have to think about those unintended effects.
Regardless of the good intentions that might be behind the motion, the actual effects would be to kill that industry by exposing an unacceptable level of risk to the national security of our customers. They simply will not come anymore. They will say, “If that's part of the process, thank you very much. We'll buy our armoured vehicles from France. See you later”.
We would not be any further ahead with human rights. We would not be any further ahead with engaging the countries. We would not be able to apply our own tests because we would not even be in the game and, in the process, we would have lost tens of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars of economic productivity, and families across this country would be much worse off.