Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise and present a petition I had intended to introduce during the last week of October, which was international Disarmament Week. The petitioners in this case, many of whom are from Saanich—Gulf Islands but not exclusively, are calling on the Government of Canada to note that the doomsday clock has now moved closer to midnight than at any time since it was established 78 years ago by the atomic scientists who started it in 1947.
The petitioners note that we are now less engaged in talks toward nuclear disarmament than at any point since Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan put us on the path, through various treaties, toward real nuclear disarmament as a plan we were working on. The petitioners note that at this point, the all-party recommendation of 2018 for the Government of Canada to play a leadership role in disarmament seems to have fallen off the radar. They call on the Government of Canada to make nuclear disarmament a key element of our foreign policy and national defence priority and to assume a leadership role in NATO and globally. They call on Canada to at least participate as an observer in the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
I will close there, noting that the matter is increasingly urgent.