Bill Graham

[Interparliamentary Delegations, April 23rd, 1999]

Madam Speaker, pursuant to Standing Order 31(4), I have the honour to present, in both official languages, the report of the Canadian delegation of the Canada-Europe Parliamentary Association (OSCE) to the meeting of the Parliamentary Association of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe held in Paris, France on March 5, 1999.

[Aboriginal Affairs, April 23rd, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development. Canada's response to the RCAP report “Gathering Strength” notes that building strong first nations requires good governance practices that are open and accountable.

What progress are the first nations and their partners making on ensuring the implementation of these important principles?

[Margaret Campbell, April 21st, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, it is with a heavy heart that I rise today in the House to pay tribute to my neighbour, friend, constituent and mentor to myself and so many Liberals in Ontario, Margaret Campbell, the first Liberal woman member of the provincial parliament in Ontario who passed away late Monday night.

In the 1960s, after having helped to pave the way for women in the legal profession, Margaret began her stellar political life as a Toronto ward councillor, subsequently being elected city-wide as a controller and going on to become a much respected city budget chief. Margaret was one of the first voices speaking to the issue of domestic violence in our society.

Margaret was invested with the Order of Canada in 1983. In 1985 she established a fund for Liberal women seeking provincial election.

In recent years, Margaret gave her time to the out of the cold program and lobbying on behalf of “her street kids”, as she called them, continuing her social work.

All Ontarians will regret the passing of Margaret, whose devotion to social justice in our community was known by all.

[Kosovo, April 12th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, that is certainly a very fair question. It is a question of dollars and I do not disagree with the member, but we also have to ask ourselves, are the dollars more? At the moment every Cruise missile costs $1 million or whatever the amount is. There is the possible loss of life on going in to solve this. If we are going to allow this to happen again, if we do sort this out, is it going to be a longer term pain for a short term gain, instead of the reverse? We really have to look at it.

I think the member will agree with me because he and I have travelled together to Bosnia and we have looked at this situation. The NATO or SFOR protectorate to call it that which exists in Bosnia is a long term operation. He would agree with that. It requires a significant commitment to re-education, to long term understanding of democracy building and otherwise. I think he would agree with me that there are bright spots in there. There is a reason for encouragement. There is a belief of a lot of people in the world today that the old-fashioned way of settling things through wars is not going to take us anywhere successfully. We have to work toward that.

I agree with the member entirely that this would not be cheap, but the war we are otherwise going to engage in to solve it would be more expensive.

[Kosovo, April 12th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, I think there is a premise in the question which I would urge the hon. member to reconsider in saying that this matter was not debated before we engaged in the aerial operation we are presently in. The member will recall that we had a debate in the House in February around the issue of the Rambouillet accords.

As I recall, at that time it was understood in the debate that if the Rambouillet accords were not adhered to, Mr. Milosevic would have to recognize that air action would be taken. My recollection was that we and the members of the House believed that was necessary to bring Mr. Milosevic to that position.

It did not succeed and the member then asks and very rightly so, what happens next if we go to ground forces? That decision can only be taken with an extreme degree of caution. I think the Prime Minister has been very cautious on this issue. He has made it very clear that this is even in his view not the time to discuss it.

If we are to discuss it, then let us make it clear it would only be done in circumstances where we would be assured that militarily the operation would be with the best possible assurance that the casualties would be minimal. We cannot ever go into a ground action and say there will be no casualties. That would be irresponsible. But we can certainly make sure that it is planned and directed in a way in which those would be an absolute minimum. That would require a great deal of planning, a great many ground forces and a lot of commitment before we got there.

I would not by any means suggest to the member that I as a responsible member of parliament would take that obligation or that idea lightly. It would be an extremely complicated and very difficult step. Given the humanitarian considerations we are looking at, we may well end up there rather than face the alternative which would be to say to Mr. Milosevic “You achieved what you want. You have a totally bombed out and destroyed society, but you have got it, you have got your piece of earth and others will not live there”.

[Kosovo, April 12th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the hon. member for Laval West.

I listened with great interest to the debate so far and I do not wish to repeat that which many hon. members have said in the House. It is clear from what I have listened to in the debate that most of our colleagues are in favour of the government's action and of NATO's action as it presently takes place. Some have even made it clear that they would support further action, including ground troops under certain circumstances if our humanitarian aim to return the people of Kosovo to their homes is not met.

All hon. members of the House recognize that our action raises difficult issues. The hon. member for Red Deer just referred to some of them. The hon. member for Scarborough—Agincourt also referred to some of them.

The issue of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Yugoslavia in traditional international law terms and in traditional diplomatic terms is a very serious issue that we must consider. The future of the United Nations system given NATO's role without specific UN security council sanction raises issues in itself which require serious consideration in the House.

Finally, among many other issues is the suffering of many innocent people in Yugoslavia. We must recognize that in seeking to stop the government of Mr. Milosevic and his war making machine others are paying the price.

All of us have many constituents with families asking us to bring an end to the situation. Those same constituents also recognize that ultimately the solution to this issue, the solution to the problem in the Balkans, will be the restoration of democracy in Yugoslavia, the restoration of an open, tolerant and pluralistic society in that area. That is how we got where we are by virtue of the existence of a dictatorship which did not stumble into the issue.

The member for Red Deer raised issues of the complexities of life in the Balkans. Members will recall that Bismarck said in 1888 “If another war occurs in Europe it will be because of some silly thing in the Balkans”. We are still wrestling with the complexities of the ending of the Turkish empire, the whole issue of the complexities of relationships of peoples in the Balkans. When we look at this issue we know that it was planned by one mastermind. It was planned by the government of Mr. Milosevic.

Recent evidence is showing that military leaders who were opposed to him were dismissed, that troops were put in with the specific issue of conducting ethnic cleansing, and that this would have gone on if we had done nothing and sat there. We were therefore forced to face this awful choice.

Would we sit there and do nothing as the member for Beauharnois—Salaberry said in the debate earlier this afternoon, or, as another member just said, what about the analogy of 1939? Would we sit there and do nothing, let it happen and run the certainty that there would have been over a million refugees in Macedonia and in other countries in the region, threatening the security of Europe for the next how many years?

How long would these million or million and a half people live in squalor and in refugee camps? Have we not seen the refugee camps in Palestine? Have we not seen refugee camps in other places where whole generations of people have grown up as refugees outside their countries? Could we in all honesty tolerate that situation to happen again if we had an opportunity to deal with it?

As the member for Red Deer's leader said this afternoon, did we not have a moral imperative to deal with it? Did we not have a right or a duty to say yes, this creates a difficult precedent? Yes, it raises difficult issues of sovereignty. Do we not have an obligation to ask ourselves whether we are living in a changed world, a world in which we have learned the lessons of failure to intervene in grave cases such as Rwanda or even the second world war?

Are we not living in a new world where humanitarian rules and humanitarian considerations prevail, rules that are being evolved by the international criminal court, by the Pinochet case and by other precedents which are telling us that national sovereignty is not what it used to be, that leaders can no longer in their own countries treat their population the way they wish and be able to get away with it because of a 19th century doctrine of national sovereignty?

We must deal with this because we are obliged to. Our peace and security are threatened when we see such situations developing with the terrible humanitarian consequences of millions of displaced people being pushed out of a country because of the iron will of one government and one man.

That is why the Prime Minister and the leaders of all other parties were of the view today that we must continue with this until there is a solution. That solution is that the Kosovars must go home. That is the moral imperative of which the leader of the Reform Party spoke this afternoon. That is the answer to the objections that the member for Red Deer has raised in the House this evening.

When members have said use ground troops if necessary that is what they are trying to deal with, recognizing that if that comes there would be an important role for a possible Russian contingent in such a force. This would be difficult but Russia's present prime minister, Mr. Primakov, is a very able and skilful diplomat. He may yet be able to bring some helpful resolution to this horrible problem.

I want to raise two other issues which I do not think have been considered in any great detail in the House today.

The first is that of Montenegro. We owe it to ourselves and to the people of Montenegro and their courageous president, Milo Djukanovic who has managed to keep his people out of this conflict, to ensure that we and our NATO allies do nothing that would push his people into a war situation. He has so skilfully and ably resisted the terrible pulls in that region and has saved his people from the scourge of this conflict. I hope that our NATO allies and our government are doing everything to ensure that peace will reign in that one small area of sanity that still prevails in that region.

Second, I hope that we will turn our minds to the issue of what will happen after. The leader of the New Democratic Party raised this in the House this afternoon. I support her position.

We have to be in a position to consider rebuilding the society after this is over. To intervene today and leave a totally destroyed society would be irresponsible. We cannot do that. We are now engaged, it seems to me, in a situation to ensure that Kosovars return to their homes, but they must return to homes. We will have to make sure that when this is over we will be engaged in a process to enable them to return to a real society that we help build together.

We also must make sure in Serbia itself, in Belgrade that the citizens know that when Mr. Milosevic goes, and he will eventually go at some time, and a new, open and liberal society is developed in that country, we will be there to help rebuild. Otherwise all we have done up to now will have been a total waste of time.

I ask members of the House that when we are calling for action today, let us not forget the humanitarian aid we are looking at. Humanitarian aid will have to extend well beyond that of helping refugees in their place. Humanitarian aid will have to go in the long term to rebuilding a society, to rebuilding democratic institutions and an infrastructure that will enable reasonable life to return to that area. Only if we look at this long view, only if we deal not only with the present crisis, but recognize the root causes of it, will we be able to avoid the problems that have led us here.

Only if we follow the road of recognizing that there is a new society with a new rule of law applicable to the Pinochets, the Rwandans, the Milosevics and others will we be able to assure ourselves that this will not reoccur and we will not be debating this issue at another time in the House in other circumstances.

[Kosovo, April 12th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, my question for the hon. member is twofold. At the end of his speech he asked the terrible question of how we will explain our fellow citizens being put in harm's way by being engaged in the present air operation or in some future operation. I thought that his leader gave the answer to that question very clearly in the House this afternoon in his speech. We are there because of a moral imperative to be there. I thought his leader put that very well. Is the member distancing himself from his leader on the issue?

A second question comes to mind. I know the member is committed to NATO, but he is very knowledgeable about foreign affairs. He knows full well that NATO's mandate does not run to Chechnya, Africa or Indonesia. Does he not fear that by raising these sorts of fears in the minds of the Canadian public that he is doing exactly what he says nobody should be doing, which is putting in doubt the credibility of NATO, which as he knows is committed to an operation in Europe and Europe alone? Far-fetched examples from around the globe will only distract people from a true understanding of what we are trying to achieve in this debate.

[Kosovo, April 12th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to explore with the hon. member what she would precisely propose in terms of this diplomatic initiative which she seems to feel we have failed to explore, given the background of the Rambouillet accord.

The hon. member well knows, of course, that the OSCE operates on a consensus minus one basis and therefore no operation to the OSCE would have been possible without the agreement of Russia and many other countries. The UN was blocked through a Russian and a possible Chinese veto, as we know.

What precisely does she say we should have done? Does she feel we should have done nothing and allowed the situation to develop recognizing the fact we needed troops? What has been said is we failed to pursue every diplomatic initiative. What else could we have concretely done? What would she have diplomatically pursued if she were in our place? How can she help the House?

[Kosovo, April 12th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, I congratulate the member on the fact that his party has aligned itself with the government position.

When you admit that the cause is just and that force is necessary, when you are even prepared to go further than the government and now call for the commitment of ground troops, why do you put political conditions on your position today?

You say that we do not have enough information, when we had all the necessary information in committee, when we are holding a debate in the House today that gives each of us an opportunity to discuss the issue. Why weaken our position, the position of the Parliament of Canada, with a condition that strikes me as completely political—

[Supply, March 15th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to ask a question of the last member who spoke.

I think this is a very important motion and certainly one which is worthy of debate. I am not one of those who believes we should not be discussing this issue. This is probably an issue which will be the subject of discussion in the House and in the country for the next 10 years.

As the last member who spoke said, it is very clear that we are moving into a new community in the world where there will be three major currencies. The establishment of the Eurodollar has established conditions where in fact it will be very difficult for other currencies, smaller currencies, those that are not part of a block, to survive, whether it is the United States currency or the European currency.

People who are interested are very concerned about this. However, I think that the problems Bloc members have in terms of bringing up this issue are several.

The first is the paradox of wanting to jump immediately into a Pan-American currency over which they will have no control, when they would be leaving a currency which they presently, through the Minister of Finance who comes from Quebec and through their members of parliament from Quebec, have a direct interest in preserving. I do not understand that paradox from their perspective.

I ask the member another question. For those of us who are looking seriously at this issue, and who recognize that it is an issue, we realize that we are going to have to deal with the Americans. We are going to have to deal with the American Congress.

The member opposite and every member of the House knows that the American Congress today acts in a very unilateral way. Does the member seriously think that it is in the interests of Quebecers to abandon a system in which they have a direct role in participating in the decision making process to go to a system where the Americans will not allow us to have any input? Or does the member actually believe that we will get a seat on the federal reserve board of this new currency?