Mr. Chair, it is an honour to rise in the chamber today on the issue of our strategic partnership with Ukraine. As members know, I have been sanctioned by Russia three times. I have also had the honour of visiting Ukraine multiple times: pre-Maidan, during Maidan, post-Maidan and several times thereafter, just before the war.
I think it is important, as we get into this debate, to take a step back and consider the environment we are in right now. When America withdrew from Afghanistan, it signalled two things. First, it signalled the end of Pax Americana, of a peace that had stretched through the world in the aftermath of the Cold War and created the greatest period of peace humanity had known.
The second thing it signalled was a retreat for NATO from Afghanistan, from a legitimate war it waged after an article 5 attack on New York on September 11, 2001. In the aftermath of that moment, we have watched all of our Cold War arrangements unfurl and the rule of law undermined.
We saw in Hong Kong the end of a deal negotiated by Margaret Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping, a deal that was supposed to last for 50 years but ended at its halfway mark with the imposition of the national security law on the people of Hong Kong. What was the western response? It was muted.
In the aftermath of that, Russia turned up its invasion of Ukraine nearly 100-fold. It dispatched battalions of soldiers, arrogantly driving to Kyiv with the purpose of conquest. What was the western response? It was, “President Zelenskyy, we have a plane for you, not the guns you need to fight and win the war.”
It is interesting to me that President Putin and Xi Jinping sat at the Beijing Olympics prior to that invasion to map out their unlimited ambition around the world. Part of that ambition included not just the borders of Ukraine and the rest of the world in the Middle East and Asia; it also included ambition on our northern borders, our Arctic sovereignty.
Only a few months ago, part of this constellation of authoritarians around the world, with their interoperable cybersecurity effects and with their interoperable drone warfare, dispatched Iran and its constellation of proxies in the region to wage war on the western alliance yet again. They did it in Iran in the horrific attacks of October 7, which claimed over 1,000 Israeli lives, and they did it in the northern part of Israel through rockets launched from Hezbollah fighters, rockets that were Iranian-built and Iranian-designed, with technologies from Russia and China.
In the aftermath of the chaos we have seen, including the conflict in Gaza, which has claimed so many lives, we also see a disruption to our global trade supply chains across the Red Sea region in the form of attacks from Iranian-backed Houthis on shipping conglomerates that drive up the cost of everything everywhere, creating chaos and disorder in international markets and compelling a response from the west to make the authoritarians stop. Only weeks ago, the same network cut data cables in the Red Sea region that supplied 25% of data from the Indo-Pacific region into Europe.
These are massive attacks across our western alliance, and as the west comes under attack, it is time for us, as a country, to grow up and join an alliance of democracies around the world that reclaim policies of peace through strength instead of experimenting with various versions of appeasement.
In this discussion, in this take-note debate today, I am encouraged by the strategic partnership with Ukraine and Canada that has been proposed and agreed to. What is more important is implementing three particular parts of it, which will define Canadian leadership and help change the course of history for the better.
First, Ukraine must win the war. President Zelenskyy rose in this chamber and asked for one thing. He said to end Russia's weaponization of energy. Why would he say that? He understood that Canada is the sole NATO ally with the potential to backfill European energy demand, with 3 trillion dollars' worth of natural resource strength, the fourth-largest oil reserves in the world, NATO's third-largest reserves of natural gas and the capacity to scale nuclear and agricultural products and technologies for the world.
Putin today mimics Stalin nearly a century ago, bent on creating famine by weaponizing the food supply, disrupting international energy supply chains, and burning and blockading grain supplies for the developing world so that it cannot reach fragile markets.
Vladimir Putin spent years choreographing Germany's dependencies on Russian oil. Having exploited that to shake down Europe, he intervened in Syria and Libya to subvert pipelines that would supply Europe and amplified misinformation against our own Canadian energy, ensuring a steady stream of revenue for Russia's war machine of nearly $1 billion a day, and $250 million a day from Germany alone, to fund his war machine.
When Germany finally realized the costs of this, Chancellor Scholz and subsequently President Volodymyr Zelenskyy came knocking on our door for Canadian energy, and both times we turned them away.
Russia and Iran scale production today, evade sanctions and provide discounted prices to Beijing to wage their wars in Europe and the Middle East. Qatar, host to Hamas, inked a 3.5-million-tonne gas deal with France just this week. If the NDP-Liberals truly care about trading relationships that support Ukraine, then they can do the one game-changing thing that the world has been demanding, which is to end Russia's weaponization of energy and let Canadian resources be what fuels, feeds and secures the world.
Second is defence production.
In our inventories as a country, we can provide Ukrainians the CRV7 missiles they require and the mobile hospitals that were purchased but not delivered. We can provide the 155-millimetre ammunition and the light armoured vehicles they require to push back against the Russian tide. This request came directly from Ukraine as well. It was the Ukrainian ambassador who took to our mainstream press. He went on our cable networks to demand that the government come to negotiate defence production and defence supply. I am encouraged to see it as part of the strategic partnership laid out here today, but I believe it is a Conservative government that would deliver the inventory and the defence production partnerships that Ukraine requires.
Finally, there is compensation for Ukrainians as they pursue the difficult task of rebuilding their economy. We know that Russia has $300 billion of frozen assets across the western world, of which $200 billion resides in Europe and $4 billion in the United States. The requirement Ukraine will have to rebuild its economy is nearly $600 billion. Repurposing these assets for losses, injuries and damages caused by Russian aggression in Ukraine is a critical requirement. We are at the halfway mark of that, but would it not be wonderful to think of Canada as a centre of investment, of infrastructure and of the partnerships that are required to rebuild the Ukrainian economy and the world thereafter? We have all the know-how, the skills and the expertise across our cities and our people to be a critical part of rebuilding this vital democracy.
Let me close with this. The democratic world needs to arrive at a shared understanding of the rivals we must now confront: rivals to our Atlantic alliance, most fiercely met by Ukrainian soldiers on the borders that they are fighting so hard to defend; rivals across the Middle East with our partners there, with borders that they deserve to maintain and with terrorist extremists that deserve to be defeated; rivals that are threatening the order of the Indo-Pacific region; and rivals that require deterrence to know that the resolve of the world is against their ambition to reorganize the world and that Canada would be a fierce and vital part of that partnership.
I am thankful for the opportunity to provide some views in this debate. Conservatives support the strategic partnership with Ukraine as an important step forward, and we believe that our future Conservative government will deliver the energy, the munitions and materiel, and the compensation for investment and infrastructure that Ukraine requires.
