Madam Speaker, I appreciated the comments by the member and remind him that he was probably also in the House, perhaps still a journalist, when his party voted for our motion, for which there was unanimous support, to move toward negotiating this very treaty.
There are already 17,000 nuclear weapons in the world, as the member has pointed out. It is very clear that the fissile material ban treaty has very little opportunity of success. The member has repeated what the Liberals are saying, which is “That is a waste of time, they are just sitting around talking, and we should do credible actions like negotiate fissbans”. However, what they are not telling this place is that the very ones who hold the nuclear weapons are refusing to sign on and are very unlikely to sign on to the fissban treaty. So much for concrete action.
Surely the member does not believe that a sound reason to refuse to participate in the ban negotiations is that Russia feels threatened by these nations who are in fact threatened themselves by the fact that these nuclear weapons continue to proliferate.