Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. friend, and he is my friend, for his remarks tonight.
I deeply hope that the Government of Canada will change its approach to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. As I said earlier, we led the way on the landmines treaty, yet we are standing aside. We may say our NATO allies are not signatories either, but they are observers. It is to our shame as Canadians that we do not even show up to observe and signal our support for the treaty.
It was a while ago that Albert Einstein said that the splitting of the atom changed everything except man's mode of thinking, “and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”
We have been warned. A nuclear holocaust did not occur in the last part of this century through a combination of good luck and divine intervention. We cannot count on luck. We have to take action before a nuclear accident occurs or, worse, the deliberate use of nuclear weapons.