Mr. Speaker, I want to begin by thanking the Bloc Québécois for putting forward this motion today and providing the House of Commons with an opportunity to debate whether or not Canada should participate or for that matter whether or not Canada should begin a conversation with the United States of America on Canadian participation in what is sometimes called national missile defence but which is more appropriately called star wars. I will explain why that is so.
Unfortunately, and I think my colleagues from the Bloc would agree, even though we are grateful to them for bringing forward today's motion, this is not exactly what we would have preferred.
What we would have preferred and what I am sure they would have preferred is for the government to have the courage of its own convictions, if that is not a contradiction when we are talking about Liberals, to bring forward a motion that would have authorized the Canadian government to begin negotiations with respect to NMD. Then members of Parliament could have expressed themselves and we could have voted accordingly. Presumably if the government has the support of its own members, the motion would have carried. Then the government could have negotiated with the United States of America on this subject and claimed that it had the backing of Parliament to do so.
Why would the Liberals not do that? It seems to me either they have a congenital contempt for Parliament that prevents them from allowing Parliament to participate in a proper way in these kinds of decisions, or perhaps they are so divided among themselves that they fear the consequences of such a vote, or perhaps it is both.
I do not want to get sidetracked too much on matters of process, although I may have something more to say about that later. I certainly regret that the government has not agreed to the request of the Bloc Québécois that by unanimous consent we might permit this motion to be voted on.
The Prime Minister invited opposition parties to use their opposition days. The Bloc members have done so. It is only a procedural fact that they do not have any votable motions left. However if the government were really keen on Parliament being able to participate, it could have agreed that this become a votable motion. The fact it has not agreed shows just how insincere and hypocritical the remarks of the Prime Minister were when he encouraged the opposition to bring forward this matter.
I want to begin speaking on the substance of this matter by quoting Nobel laureate John Polanyi, who is a senior fellow at Massey College, University of Toronto. As reported in an article in the Globe and Mail on Wednesday, May 7, he said:
It is evident that NMD points the world down the wrong path; it is the path of fortress-building, which, in the 21st century, is hopelessly anachronistic. Unchecked, weapons and counterweapons lead only to the development of further weapons. In the course of NMD, outer space will be weaponized. Satellites, now the vital eyes and ears of the world, will then become targets. The pursuit of security through unbridled armament will have led to a pandemic of insecurity.
This sums up the reasons the NDP and others see this step that the government appears about to take as the wrong decision. It is wrong to contemplate it in the first place. By agreeing to even discuss this with the United States we will be agreeing to an emerging doctrine, an emerging strategic defence doctrine, on the part of the United States that goes against everything Canada has stood for, for decades.
I am speaking here of our longstanding commitment to arms control through multilateral agreements. It is no coincidence that in order for the national missile defence plan to even be considered, the anti-ballistic missile treaty had to be abrogated by the United States.
A longstanding arms control treaty had to be abrogated unilaterally by the United States in order for the very thing the government wants to talk to the United States about to be able to happen. This should have been the first clue that what we are being asked to be a part of is contrary to Canadian tradition.
The government will say that geopolitical circumstances have changed. Mostly what it says is that now Russia and China do not have any objections, or particularly Russia, that somehow the United States has come to an accommodation with Russia on this. That may be true, but I would say to the Minister of Foreign Affairs that geopolitical circumstances can change again. I hope that is not so, but it could well be that five or ten years down the road there could be an antagonistic relationship between Russia and the United States once again and what would we have in place as a result of basing policy on what may well only be a snapshot in terms of geopolitical circumstances? We would have the very thing we have been trying to avoid for 40 years.
Let us not have so much confidence in the present that it will last forever. Let us be much more cautious than the government appears to be.
It is the wrong path because it repudiates decades of commitment to multilateral arms control. It is the wrong path because it is destabilizing, even if it is not star wars, and I contend that it is, for the very reasons so many people have outlined. This would be an encouragement to other countries to build similar systems or to arm themselves and to have even more missiles so that they could conceivably break through any missile defence the United States might have if they were to become enemies of the United States.
Mostly I want to say that it is an act of deliberate blindness on the part of the Liberal government to pretend that this is not star wars, that this is not part and parcel of a strategy at the Pentagon and on the part of the Bush administration to eventually create a world in which the very thing that we call star wars is a reality.
As evidence of what I am saying, let me cite from a document I have here, a report of the Project for the New American Century, September 2000. Incidentally this report was produced before September 11, 2001. So much of what happens today is supposed to be justified by what happened on September 11, 2001. The fact of the matter is that a lot of what we are discussing here today is not a response to September 11, 2001; it is something that had been in the works for a long time before the tragic events of September 11, 2001.
The report of the Project for the New American Century entitled “Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century”, is quite a lengthy document. It is recommended reading, I would say, for anyone who really wants to know what is going on because the people who wrote this report are the ones who are writing the script for American foreign policy at the moment at the Pentagon and in the White House. What does it say?
The section “Key Findings” talks about core missions for U.S. military forces and two of them are relevant to the debate here today. The first one says:
Develop and deploy global missile defences to defend the American homeland and American allies, and to provide a secure basis for U.S. power projection around the world.
Even if one does not accept the fact that there is anything to defend against in terms of missiles, at least in principle the idea of defending the American homeland and American allies is not something one would want to quarrel with. But to provide a secure basis for U.S. power projection around the world, what does that mean?
The second one says:
Control the new “international commons” of space and “cyberspace,” and pave the way for the creation of a new military service--U.S. Space Forces--with the mission of space control.
This is the context in which the decision the government is about to make has to be looked at. It cannot be looked at ahistorically, as if it is happening in some pristine, idealistic environment. It is happening in the context of opening up discussions with an American administration that has this in mind.
Further to what I am saying, I would also like to read this into the record. It is the United States “Space Command Vision for 2020”. Under a section called global engagement it states:
The proliferation of missiles and weapons of mass destruction, WMD, requires an NMD.
So far, so good in the sense that this is the standard argument, although it is not something that we accept. Then it goes on to say:
NMD will evolve into a mix of ground and space sensors and weapons.
All I am asking of the Liberal government is to be straightforward with us, not to pretend, not to put its hands over its eyes or bury its head in the sand and pretend that somehow this is not part of a long term plan for the weaponization of space. Let us stop kidding the House of Commons, to the extent that the government consults the House of Commons.
Maybe government members are kidding themselves. They are certainly kidding the Canadian people. The Liberals are kidding them to the extent that, by entering into these negotiations they are in fact entering into negotiations to become part of a stage of something they have repeatedly said they are against, which is the weaponization of space.
They may want to argue that they continue to be against the weaponization of space and that is why they want to be at the table, that is why they want to be part of the negotiations. If that is true, then I invite them to make that a whole lot clearer than they have. I invite them to say clearly to the United States that not only are they against the weaponization of space in principle, but that a condition of the negotiations is that there will be no weaponization of space and that the United States will commit to hosting an international conference to develop a convention against the weaponization of space, as has been suggested.
U.S. congressman Dennis Kucinich of Ohio has called on Canada, or perhaps also the U.S. government, to launch a conference to seek approval of an international treaty to ban weapons in space. A former defence minister, Paul Hellyer, said in the Globe and Mail today that we would be much better off, and contributing to a more peaceful world, if we were to support this call by Congressman Kucinich rather than entering into these negotiations, as the government is about to do, and pretending that somehow this is not part of an overall American commitment to the weaponization of space.
So, wrong path, but also the wrong set of reasons given by Canada or in some sense not owned up to by Canada. I firmly believe, as many do, that the rush to judgment on this is not due to some American timetable but is due to an overzealous desire on the part of the government to make up for the decision that was taken with respect to Canadian non-participation in the war in Iraq.
That was a decision on the part of the Liberal government that I welcomed, that we in the NDP welcomed. However, we will not be welcoming it in retrospect if it leads in every other respect to the Canadian government feeling that it has to make up for that brief shining moment of independence by agreeing to everything else that the American administration wants the Canadian government to do. It will not have been worth it if in the end we were independent for a few months and then dependent and obedient for decades to come as a result.
I hope, but I suspect otherwise, that what we see here in respect of the government's position on star wars is not a form of atonement, if you like, for the alleged sin of not complying with American wishes when it came to the war in Iraq.
I said wrong reasons. Here are some of the other wrong reasons: “Well, we have to be at the table”. Well, not if it is wrong. Not if it is wrong: surely the government is not counselling that wherever there is a table and somebody is discussing something Canada has to be there. We only want to be at the table if they are discussing something with which we agree. We certainly do not want to be there to legitimize something that we think is profoundly contrary to the long term security and peace of the world.
People may disagree about this. If the Canadian Alliance feels that this is in the long term interests of peace and security in the world and wants to be at the table, that makes sense. That is at least internally coherent, which is not always true of Canadian Alliance positions. But for the Liberals to say, “We are against the weaponization of space but we want to be at that table”, I think they could be sending a much stronger message by saying, “We know what NMD is all about and we know that it is going to lead to the weaponization of space. We see it in American document after American document and we are not going to pretend otherwise. We are going to tell the truth about what this is really all about”. That would be a much better thing to do.
This having to be at the table business just does not cut it. In fact, as even the Canadian Alliance member pointed out from a different point of view, this is an argument that the government rejected just months ago. If the government wanted to have influence on the war in Iraq, then it should have participated in the war in Iraq, but the Liberals thought that the war in Iraq was wrong, or that it was contrary to international law, or whatever the real reasons were that the Liberals did not participate. They did not want to be at that table. They did not want to be part of it. That is the way it should be with NMD.
Then there is the economic argument, which the Liberals have given to some extent, but the Canadian Alliance is more guilty of this: that somehow we have to consider what is good for our economy. I would agree that we have to consider what is good for our economy, but we cannot allow economic considerations to cloud what are ultimately judgments about the future of the planet. We cannot allow those kinds of economic considerations to cloud our moral judgment if in fact we believe that the weaponization of space is something to which we would want to object on moral grounds. I find these economic arguments very specious indeed.
I have talked about the wrong path. I have talked about the wrong reasons, particularly the Canadian reasons being given. I understand the American reasons. They are much more honest about what they are doing. We disagree with them, but they are very up front about what they are about. They are not completely up front because they are trying to pretend that this does not have to do with star wars, yet document after document shows that it does. We know that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has been interested in the weaponization of space for decades, so to that extent they are not being completely forthright.
But they are being more forthright than the Canadian government, which suggests that this is just a limited thing, that there is nothing to worry about, that it does not even have to consult Parliament. It says, “We are going to have a complete departure from everything we have said for decades”, and even from what this government has said about the weaponization of space, “and we are not even going to have a debate in Parliament. We are going to leave that up to the opposition. We are just going to have a discussion among the Liberal caucus”. How many times have people stood up and said, “We are discussing this in the Liberal caucus”? The Liberal caucus presumably is being told by the government what is involved, or maybe not. Maybe the caucus is being asked to debate it in the kind of vacuum in which we are being asked to debate it.
But the Liberal caucus and the Liberal Party are not Canada. The Liberal Party and the Liberal caucus are not Parliament. The Liberal Party and the Liberal caucus are not the entire political world of Canadians. Quite apart from the issue of star wars, regarding the answers we have received that “we are discussing it among ourselves”, I have not seen any evidence so strong in a long time that shows just how arrogant and self-contained the Liberal collective ego is with respect to how they see the country and their relationship with the country.
All of us here, all Canadians, both opposition parties and citizens and others, we are just dross. We are just props to create the illusion of democracy, because the real decisions are being made in the Liberal caucus, and if things are being discussed there why should any of us even be concerned about it? We should just feel reassured that the best minds in the country are gathered at the feet of the Prime Minister. The rest of us have nothing to worry about.
Wrong path, wrong reasons, wrong process, contempt for Parliament: there is a lot to talk about but I think my time has almost expired. Certainly we in the New Democratic Party are adamantly opposed to NMD. We call it star wars. We call it stars wars because in the end that is what this is about. It is a funny thing. Star wars in its former incarnation was the SDI, the strategic defense initiative. Even Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, not noted for his independence of mind when it comes to U.S. foreign policy, was able to say to the United States when it came to SDI and star wars, “No. We are not going to be a part of that”.
All we are asking of the government is that it have at least the independence of mind that prime minister showed with respect to SDI, which is what star wars was called then. Star wars is now called NMD. The government should stop pretending that it is just some limited thing, that it is not part of an overall strategic doctrine inimical to everything Canada has ever stood for. The government should stop pretending that. It should be honest with Canadians. If the government still wants to go ahead, then it should at least be answerable for what it is really doing, instead of getting away with pretending it is doing something else.