Bob Mills

[Foreign Affairs, November 4th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, simply following up on those allegations, I checked that out today. Basically the foreign affairs people, your own people, are saying exactly what you say, that they have looked at this—

[Government Expenditures, November 2nd, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, when Canadians tune in to Hockey Night in Canada they notice a large Government of Canada sign on the ice surface of the Molson Centre. Those signs cost $540,000.

How can this government justify spending over half a million dollars on these signs when the other emblem of our Canadian self, the RCMP, is not receiving enough funds?

[Agriculture, November 2nd, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, Canadian farmers are facing a cash crisis and although there are many factors contributing to their financial plight, the greatest challenge faced by our farming communities is to overcome Liberal arrogance, apathy and inaction.

With world commodity levels bottoming out, it is obvious that Canadian farmers are suffering the ill effects of the Asian flu. For example, first estimates for 1998 suggest that the drop in farm income will be 40% across Canada with the worst hitting the prairie provinces.

Yet in their time of need Canadian farmers hear too little too late from the Liberals. The weak willed government simply restates that regular income stabilization schemes like NISA and crop insurance will pull farm families through.

The government has abandoned farmers, abandoned those who put food on our tables and therefore abandoned an essential element of Canada, our farming communities. It is time for Canadian answers and action, not indifference and denial from the government.

[Kosovo, October 28th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, Canadians are concerned about the humanitarian crisis occurring in Kosovo. Canadians are also concerned about the possibility of hostages being taken, particularly when they are being sent unarmed. We all remember what happened in Bosnia. We had a total of 55 Canadians taken hostage. Will any of us forget Patrick Riechner chained to a post as a human shield? Canadians do not want that repeated.

Why is the minister sending unarmed Canadians into this war zone?

[Supply, October 20th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, it is certainly a question that if the hon. member had more time he would say more about. That is just the point.

I watched the Somalia inquiry and watched how it was planned. The planned thing was to carry on these long extensive hearings, to shoot any messengers who happened to come forward who might want to testify and give the truth, to go after the media and blame the media for some aspects and to then go on to try to single out some of the lower guys in the chain of command, find an RCMP officer, find a private somewhere and go after him and pummel him and make him look like the victim. Then the other tactic is to draw it out as long as we can so that fatigue itself destroys the whole honesty of the process.

I hope Canadians will get tired of this approach. I hope they will not accept the fact that two or three RCMP officers will be expected to take the fall at the end of the inquiry. Meanwhile, the guys who organized it at the top get off scot-free. They have gone through that process one too many times and are about ready to pay the price.

[Supply, October 20th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to talk about the issue and problem the students have in Vancouver.

I was there for four days of the APEC meetings and know what the security was like and the situation was on the ground. I would like to take my time today to quote largely from a student at UBC, a teacher in my constituency who was there on the front line of the whole issue.

He has taught English at Lindsay Thurber high school since 1986. He has taught at Red Deer College, at UBC, and at the University of Hawaii. He has a bachelor of education with distinction from the University of Calgary and a masters degree from the University of Victoria. He was the Rotary international ambassador of goodwill from my home Rotary Club in the University of Hawaii for a year. He is now a Ph.D. candidate at the University of British Columbia. His area of special interest is social justice in education.

He was at this event. He was part of it. He was there throughout the whole thing, the preparation, the weeks and months prior to APEC. The kind of person he is tells it all. He served as a board member of the Alberta multiculturalism commission. He is the vice-president of the Alberta association of multicultural education, among a number of other distinguished positions he holds in the community.

In 1987 Darren spearheaded an action group in our community of students and teachers opposing prejudice, a group known as STOP. This became a model for students across Canada and through the U.S.

In 1998 he received the race relations award from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and in 1993 he received the Canadian student rights achievement award from the league for human rights of B'Nai Brith Canada.

In 1996 he received a Reader's Digest national leadership in education award and in 1987 he won the Alberta human rights award.

This gentleman is married, has two small children and was a student at this assembly. This was not some kind of kook who was there as a rebel, as we so often hear described in this House by people who obviously have not taken time to even look at the issue.

This is his experience and I think this might tell the House more than anything else. He wrote:

Last November I witnessed a disturbing spectacle that has shaken my faith—in this country.

As a resident of student housing at the University of British Columbia, however, the upcoming meeting took on a more ominous tone as November 25 drew nearer. At random intervals throughout the day and night thundering military helicopters made low passes over the treed peninsula.

A groundswell of public discontent was rising, as fair minded people began to question how the Prime Minister could ignore basic human rights.

Many UBC scholars and students spoke out against APEC and our welcoming leaders notorious for brutality against their own citizens. The protest rally being planned for the meeting day was taking shape as an important display of the democratic right to free expression. But what transpired would tarnish a campus, the police forces involved, a government and its leader.

A vibrant, almost festive tone characterized the early stages of the protest; activists performed skits and speeches and the Raging Grannies sang—.Meanwhile, stiff plainclothes officials milled through the crowd, some taking pictures, others talking into headsets, as choppers whirred overhead.

The march toward the meeting area gained momentum with more chants and songs, and the crowd grew to nearly 2,000 peaceful protesters by the time we reached the approved protest zone.

I think this says it all:

I froze as I noticed sharp-shooters surveying the crowd from atop the nearby Chan Centre for the Performing Arts. At the graduate student building, the Tibet flag, a silent reminder of one brutal Chinese campaign of genocide, was removed by RCMP “on special orders”.

Barking police attack dogs intimidated those near the front, and city police officers in cycling shorts used their bicycles as battering rams to keep protesters back from the fence after it came loose.

Suddenly and without warming, RCMP officers began emptying dozens of fire extinguisher-sized canisters of pepper spray into the eyes of those nearest to the front. Random chance determined that I and my colleagues from the faculty of education were spared an agonizing attack, while many around us winced in pain.

[The Prime Minister] may say he puts it on his plate, but this ostensibly harmless “pepper” is known to have caused at least 60 deaths in the past seven years in the U.S.—

He quotes the source of that statistic.

He goes on to talk about how at Green College, a place for high academics, the very best from the world attending, they had signs in their windows that were removed by the police saying such offensive things as free speech and democracy. Now we have to look at this whole situation. We have to look at how the government has treated this whole affair. In our foreign affairs committee, because the Prime Minister and the foreign affairs minister will not show up at the hearings and will not tell how it really was, we asked that they appear there. Even one Liberal spoke in favour of that. The hon. member for Vancouver Quadra was removed from committee the next day. That is how the government responded to that.

The next week a motion came that we should fund these students because we had a David and Goliath affair going on here. It is fine for the Prime Minister to stand up and say Mr. Considine can handle that whole thing. But there is no way that one man can be expected, no matter how good he is, to handle the affairs of these students and to give them a level playing field against all of these government lawyers. No matter what anybody says in the House, the public now knows how the government abused these students and their complaints.

Whether they are right or wrong is not the question. The point is they are Canadians. They were not treated in a Canadian manner. The government did not give us pride in our country and we are embarrassed for the way it treated these students.

Very simply, I believe this motion is speaking to the very issue of free speech and of right of assembly. The Prime Minister, in his joking way about baseball bats, pepper steaks and pepper on his plate, is insulting all of us as Canadians. He should be embarrassed and he should be chastised by his own caucus for his embarrassing performance that Canadians have to witness day after day on television.

I think Canadians are now seeing the sort of person he really is. He really is that guy who will choke somebody. He really is that guy who will have a soapstone under his bed to bash somebody on the head. He really is that kind of person.

The truth hurts. Members across the floor obviously do not like to hear this because they are liberal minded, they care about human rights and they care about people. They are obviously demonstrating that they have none of those features.

I failed to mention at the start that I will be sharing my time and another member will be picking up from here.

[Kosovo, October 7th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I think the frustration is obvious. The minister has expressed that. I think all of us would express it.

If I were answering that question I would say that the bombing will bring Milosevic to the table because he understands a plank over the head. Then the real problem starts because there has to be a long term plan to provide the people with a solution. I would start with education, hospitals and infrastructure.

We could ask about dollars and who will do that. Then the diplomatic work starts to get everybody involved in solving the problem. Do we have the will? Do we have the money? Those are the questions.

[Kosovo, October 7th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, as we have always done in take note debates, we would support the ultimate decision to use military force if dealing with someone like Mr. Milosevic. That is the only thing he understands. We also believe that these questions should be asked and answered. That is what Canadians want to know.

Overall our party and Canadians support our involvement in international situations. Obviously, though, we are responding to a humanitarian need. It is very troubling that the veto will be used. We may end up fulfilling NATO action as opposed to UN action.

That is troubling because I believe it greatly weakens the position of the United Nations. It means that more and more people will challenge its authority. Going outside the UN does nothing but hurt that organization and could ultimately lead to its demise.

[Kosovo, October 7th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, we had what I would consider to be a fairly successful debate in committee regarding the Haiti situation. Experts came before us and resolutions were put forward. I see the chairman nodding on the other side. He would agree that it worked quite well. It was extensive. We had a chance to ask a lot of questions and we had a chance to debate. The problem was that it was only members of the committee. It did not get out to Canadians the way it would if we used the full House for something as important.

It needs more debate. We need to get the information out. This take note debate will not do it. I am firmly convinced of that, even though our briefings will help solve some of the problems.

[Kosovo, October 7th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, certainly it is my pleasure to speak to this issue. I guess it is the sort of thing that one wishes they did not have to talk to in this parliament.

I have to go back to when I first came to this parliament. I think the very first week we were here we were discussing Bosnia. That was one of the first issues on the table. At that point we again had a take note debate and again we were dealing with the issue of how to deal with this sort of situation.

It is obvious that we do need to deal with it. There are 275,000 people suffering, both of Albanian and Serbian background. There are 50,000 or more homeless people. All of us are touched by that. We all watch television, and we all believe that we must respond.

I do not think the question is that we need to respond, that we need to do something. However, there are a lot of questions that we need to address, that we need to bring forward. Therefore, this evening I will try to ask some of these questions. Some of them are not answerable, but I still think Canadians expect us to discuss them in this House.

It is symptomatic of the age in which we live, the post-cold war period, that we have a lot of these problem areas which require action.

We agree with much of what the minister says. That is the case on issues such as this. Certainly we have to support the fact that we may require NATO action because people like Slobodan Milosevic seem to understand only one thing and that is the big hammer over the head. It is unfortunate that people like that exist, but there are many of them in many parts of this world that we have to deal with. We obviously support that sort of NATO response or the ultimate probability that that response will be required.

We as well read the report of Kofi Annan this week. We read about the 6,000 to 7,000 buildings which have been destroyed. We saw villages totally damaged, being shelled, and people living in fear of returning to their homes.

As I look at those pictures on television I cannot help but think back to travelling through some of those valleys in Bosnia where there was mile after mile, kilometre after kilometre, of bombed out villages. There was nobody there. The only thing we could see were the graves in the ditches as we drove along in the bus. There was total silence. I have never experienced war. There were not even birds flying in the air. It was totally dead silence. There were nothing but graves.

That brought it home very quickly. We could not step off the roadside. We could not drive our vehicle off the road. We were told to only stand on what looked like old pavement because there were mines everywhere. There were mines in the corn fields. Cobs of corn had plastic explosives in them. When someone picked that cob of corn they would loose an arm or a leg. They would be maimed.

The most serious thing I saw was in a schoolyard. The children had all gone into the school. I visited with those children. They wrote to me about what it was like to live in a war zone. I have 12 pages of 10 and 11 year old kids telling me what it was like and what their future would be like. What I saw in the schoolyard were Coke tins. They looked like full Coke tins sitting on the table. I said to the translator “Those are Coke tins. The kids are going to love those”. He said “Let me grab a big stick”. He grabbed a big stick and pushed the Coke tin off the table. There was a loud boom and the table disappeared. There was a mine underneath that Coke tin. Some little kid was going to grab that Coke tin when they came out from class. That would be retaliation.

That is what we are talking about. That is the kind of environment that we as Canadians cannot imagine exists anywhere in the world.

It is obvious why we need to get involved. The humanitarian factor is so obvious, but the problems are many. We saw the guy on television carrying the limp body of his young child. That wells up something in all of us and says that we must respond to this kind of terror.

As well the minister mentioned the problem of the United Nations. This is a problem that we are going to have to deal with. This problem is not just in Kosovo. We can go back and talk about Rwanda. We can talk about Nigeria. We can talk about Bosnia. The inability of the United Nations to respond is becoming a more serious problem.

I travelled to India and Pakistan this summer. The inability to respond to the problem in that area is something that the world has to deal with. We need to deal with the Kashmir problem. I have said, and I will say it again, that Canada has an important role to play. We can show some leadership. I call it diplomatic leadership. I call it mediation. We could become the mediators of the world. I use some of these examples and I would even carry it as far Kosovo. We have a reputation which would allow us to be there and do things that the Americans cannot do, the Russians cannot do, the French cannot do and the British cannot do. No one can do it but a country like Canada which is a middle power. We are in the G-7. We belong to NATO. We belong to all kinds of things. We would be respected in playing that role.

I am frustrated, as I am sure the minister is. I grabbed from my notes a note of March 23, 1998 when I talked to our caucus about Kosovo. I could grab other ones. I said that there has to be action. People are being killed. Women and children are being killed. We are now in October and we are still talking. We have done nothing. That is extremely frustrating for all of us. We have to end it. We have to find a better way of dealing with these kinds of situations. I wish I had all the answers and could say “Mr. Minister, this is what we have to do and it will all work”. I can give him some suggestions, but I do not know that they will answer all of the problems.

I have difficulty with take note debates. I repeat this and I will say it every time we have one of these debates. I think the better way would be to have the House invite someone to give us a complete briefing. It would be for all members of parliament and it would be done in a non-partisan fashion. We should bring in the best experts we have in this country, and we have a number of them. Let them tell us all about this issue so that we as Canadians understand the issue much better.

Then we could let two speakers or four from the government and two from the opposition, whatever the formula, give the position of their respective party.

Then we could have an honest vote, based not on partisan politics. This is not partisan stuff. We are talking about lives. We are talking about people. Then we could vote on what we should do. We could come to a consensus. I think foreign affairs lends itself to that and we would be respected. We would feel better in ourselves. Many feel they should speak on these issues but do not necessarily have the background, understanding or information to do it. I would put forward that suggestion as being a better way than the take note debate we are having here tonight.

I think the problem of being so slow to respond is probably more frustrating than anything else about this issue. I would like us to address that. When we deal with someone like Slobodan Milosevic or Saddam Hussein, or whoever we want to put in this category, we know what kind of person we are dealing with and, therefore, we should be able to build a response to these kinds of people.

Canadians want to know a number of things. They want to know what we will bomb if we have to bomb something. They want to be assured that we are not just going to create more victims. They are concerned about the nature of the police force, the nature of the Serbian clean-up and the ethnic cleansing. Can we really go in and bomb unless it is decided that we are going for Belgrade and we are really going to teach this guy a lesson? He would understand that all right, but is that really the solution that we should be talking about? How far do we go? We should talk about that.

What about the dangers for Canadians? We should talk about that too. We understand that in Serbia there is a really good radar system. There are missiles, there are rockets and there is a defence system set up there.

If Canadians are at risk we should know that ahead of time. I know it is fine to say military is always at risk, but I think the levels of risk could certainly be discussed more fully.

Are we considering using ground troops? We know ground troops would be the way to make it work. In Bosnia it works because there are people with big guns and they use a big stick.

One thing I learned from talking to people there was that the hatred is still there and they are waiting. They are waiting because that big gun will go away some day and when it does they will kill their neighbour who killed their grandmother, their grandfather or their child.

These kids can talk about what happened in 1942. They are 10 years old. They can relate what happened in 1536 when the Ottoman Turks came. My goodness, they are living 500 years of history and it is affecting them.

The answer would be to get on the ground and come up with a plan.

I think we always have to ask about U.S. dedication to this whole issue. That is a question that we all need to know because I do not know that any of us could be there without that big U.S. stick.

We need to know and we need to be assured by our defence minister about the readiness of our troops and equipment. We are proud of them. Those of us who have travelled in war zones, when we see the Canadian flag on the troop carrier, it makes us darned proud. But we have to be sure that they are equipped to handle this sort of thing.

As well, besides saying that we need a long term plan, we should be a part of the contact group. I think we have earned our stripes. We have been there from the beginning. I cannot see how we cannot force ourselves, more aggressively, to become a part of that contact group. Our future involvement should partly depend on our having a say about what our troops do.

When we talk about a long term plan we need to involve the European Union. We need to ask what it is prepared to commit in its backyard. I know the difficulties in asking that question. I posed it to Germans and French and have received opposite stories. They need to face up to that as well.

We need schools. We need infrastructure. We need planned society for 30 years or 40 years if we are to fix that part of the world. Who has the commitment and the money? Only on a big, collective issue can we do it. Then we could be proud and say that we have done something for that country.

The concept of regional instability troubles us all. We are concerned about Russia economically, from a nuclear standpoint and from a stability standpoint in Europe and the rest of the world. We are concerned about Macedonia and Albania and a potential flare-up. We are also concerned about Greece and Turkey, two NATO partners that may come into conflict in terms of this decision. We need to ask those questions and need to be sure we have looked at them before we get too far into any kind of military action.

I wish I could say tonight that I have the solution, that this is what the minister should be doing and if we were government we would do it. However, this is not situation we are looking at. We are looking at a situation where Canadians need to understand our involvement. We need to get that information out through members of parliament of all parties. We need to answer their questions. We need to address the issues. Then we can say we have done what we are here to do in terms of an issue like this one.

I hope the minister thinks seriously about a different approach to take note debates. If it does not work we can always come back to this method. If we could just give it a try we would have better informed members of parliament, better informed Canadians, and more pride in the actions we take to help people of the world in serious crises such has the one in Kosovo.