Ted McWhinney

[Social Security System, February 2nd, 1994]

Never mind, Mr. Speaker. I enjoyed listening to the member for Lévis. I really appreciated his remarks.

I am reminded it is a long day. My day began 12-1/2 hours ago with a regional caucus meeting. One of these days somebody should write a book on how Parliament makes a law. We would discover in empirical fashion that it is not made in the give and thrust of debates in Parliament, in the Chamber, although that is important. It is made in the dialectical processes of exchange of views and compromises and give and take in committees but it can be the committees in which they have all the parties fully represented. That is where we reach our compromise and our consensus and that is how we make laws.

I suppose it is an interesting lesson in our approach to this problem of social policy. I am most impressed by the statement by the distinguished Minister of Human Resources Development and one has to remind oneself that however important a portfolio is it is not an island to itself. We are reminded again of the Liberal Party program which for better or for worse was to accept the grave problem of the deficit that exists. One must do something about it.

One will solve it not by cries of despair alone but by trying to create employment, the jobs, the flow of revenue and maintaining our comprehensive social security network in which we lead the world and of which we are very justly proud.

If we approach the issue of human resources and what the ministry should do, it is concerned with many facets of cabinet operations and many portfolios.

I am reminded of one of those distinguished papers which I reread quite recently issued in the Second World War by Archbishop Temple who later became Archbishop of Canterbury on the need for reconstruction in the post war period. He was emphasizing then that you must use your human resources and to get an economy moving you must create employment. It is an older truth but it is still true today.

When I look at the situation in Canada today the most obvious need is for a long term strategy and the long term strategy in terms of human resources is to create globally competitive industries, leading edge technology that provides not simply short term jobs for tomorrow or even the day after tomorrow but 10 years from now.

In a very real sense this is the challenge for my own province of British Columbia as we have tried to escape from an original primary resources based economy to a more sophisticated post industrial economy that recognizes the glut in primary resources around the world that you cannot base your economic well-being on primary resources any more alone, although I must say with imaginative management policies and investment in the search much is being done to remain ahead of the rest of the world.

You must invest in industry and leading edge industry and that means an relationship not merely between the ministry of employment but the ministry of education. These go together. The Japanese miracle is to understand that the post modern society's technology is based on research and that is based on education and on universities but universities of the 21st century.

For those who have spent, as I suppose most people here have, much of their lives in universities we would have to recognize that the dead hand of tradition lies very heavily on universities. There are obligations to stay abreast with the scientific technologically based community in which we are living. Universities need to move into that threshold between pure study and application and in some ways the technische hochschule, those technical universities in continental Europe, give us a lead which the Japanese took up and which is the explanation of the Japanese miracle.

In our attempt in British Columbia to escape from the primary resources based economy we have invested heavily in education, in science, in pursuit of advanced technology and the jobs that flow from that.

If I may I will refer to a case study, as it were, of this. I would stress, though, that science is not simply the cataloguing of dead knowledge from a past era. There is a poetic element in the great scientists that distinguishes the Einstein from the ordinary scientist. Those inductive leaps into the future require that element of vision.

We are very fortunate in British Columbia to have had a scientist of the calibre of Erich Vogt who has that poetic vision and a strong university president who recognizes that if you invest in the science of tomorrow, you may have to wait 10 years for the fruits to come back. But they will come back in a much better and a much larger quantity than if you are simply looking for results that will show on balance sheets next year or 18 months from now.

It is what Dr. Strangway, the very brilliant administrator at the University of British Columbia calls the development in North America of "hot spots". One of the interesting things is the development of pharmacological research with its offshoots into applied industrial development. It is a feature of that area of land that encompasses British Columbia, Oregon and Washington. These universities and the communities co-operating together are pushing the world community to the advanced frontiers of pharmacological research, one which by the way yielded a Nobel Laureate for Canada several months ago by the name of Dr. Michael Smith of the University of British Columbia.

New technologies, pion therapy for example for brain tumours or the superconductors which are the product of the TRIUMF project at the University of British Columbia are not projects created in the abstract, pure ventures in science that do not have a spin-off. For example KAON and TRIUMF spend approximately $30 million a year for research. The spin-off to industries such as the Ebco Industries Ltd. in Richmond, British Columbia, a company that started as a small tool manufacturing company developed by two German immigrant brothers has been converted into a $100 million a year export industry as a direct result of the TRIUMF research and the spin-off secondary industry resulting from it.

If British Columbia and Canada are to create the jobs, to create those incomes and the flow of revenue to reduce the deficit, this is the way we should be going, investing in that frontier of science and knowledge, investing in education. It does mean, and I do not wish here to get into constitutional issues to which I have given a good deal of my professional life, but I do think we are looking at a stage at which national norms with a large element of imagination and leadership in them are required. Whether that is reached by strong federal government alone or in co-operation with provinces is an matter we will be discussing with the minister in charge of intergovernmental relations in the future.

I am a little concerned, and I have voiced this in other arenas than the present one, with the possibility that TRIUMF and its progeny the KAON project, because of under funding by the Canadian government, by foreign governments that perhaps are not kept fully to their obligations by pressure from our own government, might fail. I would view that as a tragedy in the sense that a thousand scientists from around the world grouped together in a Canadian university community, researching together on common projects, the spin-off in those small commercially usable cyclotrons, the objects of this sort that are the rich product of that investment in money and research. There is a case for pure science. The federal government has led here in the past and I would hope it will do so in the future.

The investment is worth the trouble. The investment in some senses is a challenge to the Canada of the 21st century that the present government committed itself to building. We will conquer the deficit by new jobs and the new jobs will be leading edge technology with the education to support it.

[Kemano Project, February 2nd, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on the issue of the Kemano completion project. The previous government's handling of this issue was improper and showed little respect for fishing groups, environmental groups and First Nations.

The government deserves praise, the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans in particular, for efforts to improve relations with these constituent groups. To date, the present government has committed to a full public airing of the issue by participating in the British Columbia Utilities Commission public hearing on the matter.

The present government is prepared to make available its expertise, to open its files and to make federal officials available as expert witnesses in these hearings.

I would suggest, however, that if we should find the province's inquiry is too narrow in its scope to cover the balancing of interests involved, the federal government should keep in reserve the possibility of a federal judicial inquiry into the matter.

[Cruise Missile Testing, January 26th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I see no contradiction there. It may be an issue of tactic, including diplomatic usage. It would be in my view a voie de fait, or tort unilaterally to denounce an agreement duly made and continued by predecessor governments with a foreign government.

I place great stress as my party does on friendly persuasion. We are not faced with George Bush as the president of the United States. We are faced with a president who had the same teachers I had and who is committed to nuclear disarmament and with all due speed. We will use friendly persuasion in Washington. We have a new relationship with Washington that is not one of

subservience or of following the line. We will be the candid friend as we were in the days of Lester Pearson.

My answer is that while honouring the obligation, duly established and conserving international law in that respect, we will use friendly persuasion with the United States and I think we will have a friendly reception.

The nuclear weapon tests in my view are anachronistic in military terms. They are out of date. They are not armed with nuclear warheads. I respect that there are consequences for local populations. I have tried to ascertain the views of the native peoples. I have suggested correcting what I think was a deliberate oversight, a discourtesy to them, by the providing of compensation.

Let us face it. There is a new wind in Washington. It is not George Bush, it is not the revived cold war. Let us go to work and ask them to change and using friendly persuasion in the Lester Pearson way I think we can achieve it.

[Cruise Missile Testing, January 26th, 1994]

I spoke about this very often with my constituents. On that point, I can tell you that I had agreed, before I was elected as member of Parliament, to be legal counsel before the International Court of Justice of The Hague if ever there were legal proceedings on that issue. And that does not go against what I just said. I tried to bring a balanced contribution to the debate; yes or no is too radical. Under the present circumstances, I think we should be allowed to say: "Yes, respect the agreement with the United States; it does not violate international law and does not go against our foreign policy objectives." If we want to change the international policy on disarmament, I believe there are better, more efficient ways of doing so. And I still hope Canada would take legal steps before the International Court of Justice of The Hague, and enter into what would be the case of the next century, to determine if nuclear testing is legal.

[Cruise Missile Testing, January 26th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, when I rise to debate this issue of the cruise missiles I find myself in some senses caught in a historical time warp. The cruise missiles almost never existed. They were discussed during the Nixon-Brezhnev Moscow exchanges in 1972. You will find them covered in detail in the Vladivostok summit discussions between President Ford and Mr. Brezhnev in 1974. They are included in the unratified SALT II treaty which, signed by the United States and the then Soviet Union, has probably entered into customary international law, even though not ratified.

I mention the almost or what might have been simply because the proposal then was to trade the cruise missile in which the Americans had advanced testing skills, against the Soviet Backfire bomber in which the Soviets had a considerable advance over comparable American weapons. In fact modifications were made on both sides and under the SALT II treaty the cruise missiles were limited to missiles not having a range in excess of 600 kilometres and launched from land-based and sea-based launch devices.

The issue came as you may remember, before the Supreme Court of Canada in 1985. The Supreme Court ruled in essence though on procedural grounds rather than substantive grounds that cruise missile testing was not unconstitutional. It is back again now and it comes against a backdrop of Canada's achievement as a world leader in disarmament. There has been a move since World War II when the use of nuclear weapons clearly was not illegal, was licit under the rules then existing to a situation where to a very large extent many jurors feel that the use of nuclear weapons is unconstitutional.

There is a law case that is sought to be raised by a group of American lawyers, graduates of President Clinton's law school, testing this issue before the World Court and the Canadian government, I believe the previous government, was asked if it would intervene in the case if it should develop.

I am mentioning simply the background, which is the world movement for the progressive development of international law achieved through UN general assembly declarations in which Canada led through a series of multilateral conventions such as the Moscow test ban treaty, the non-proliferation treaty and the moon treaty and outer space treaty which Canada contributed to signally, as well as a series of bilateral treaties between the United States and the then Soviet Union. SALT I is one of these, of course, but most recently there was the intermediate range nuclear forces agreement of 1987 between President Reagan and Secretary Gorbachev.

It reached the stage where, in a work published in 1989 by me and my distinguished friend the then president of the World Court, Nagendra Singh, we posed the question whether the user of nuclear weapons was illegal per se. That is an issue that may come before the World Court shortly.

This is simply a preface to the fact that the present American President has made massive steps since his election to fill in the uncompleted gaps in the outlawing of nuclear weapons. He is moving to extend the IMF treaty to short range nuclear weapons and to the intercontinental ones which are only covered to a certain extent laterally by SALT I and its interim agreement on protocols limiting the numbers of strategic warheads. President Clinton is a man of peace and committed to nuclear disarmament.

This brings me to the present issue that nuclear warheads are not involved in the testing of the cruise missiles in Canada's northern territories. Clearly there is no violation of international law involved.

The issues of political choice and wisdom are what is involved here. I hesitate to draw on my experience as a 19-year old airman and flyer. I have always understood that the tests were authorized in Canada simply because we replicated the northern approaches to the then Soviet city of Leningrad. I have flown over these northern approaches from Archangel to Leningrad in a civilian capacity. The comparison to northern Canada is very close.

However, that is all gone. The cold war is gone. What we have is an agreement entered into in good faith with a friend and ally whose fulfilment is being asked by that friend and ally at this stage. There is a case, the strongest of cases, for observing agreements if one has entered into them: pacta sunt servanda.

On that basis, unless there were an issue of violation of international law or some other high policy reason, I would say one should observe international agreements. I would hope that our government will speak to President Clinton, would encourage him in his move towards completing nuclear disarmament and raise the questions about whether the tests are necessary.

I would warn against any temptation to a unilateral repudiation of an engagement made because it invites unilateral reactions of the same nature. There are American senators who wish to make changes in American law to cut down on obligations that the United States and Canada have entered into in trade and other matters. Retaliation in these sorts of unilateral actions is something one has to bear in mind.

There is a case for the Canadian government to speak candidly to its friend, the United States, and say: "Do you really need these? We will go along nevertheless in good faith if you do".

I am persuaded by two further arguments. One is the dependence, the settled expectations, of communities in the north that have built local economies and local employment on the continuance of these testings. There is a concept of due process that settled expectations should not suddenly be displaced unless there is a good reason to the contrary. I do take note of the economic interests and concerns of people in those northern regions who are represented by some of the members opposite.

I also take note of the views of our colleague, the member for Western Arctic, whose views as published I have read. It is clear that there objections by native communities to these tests and on the usque ad coelum principle. To translate simply, if they own part of the terrain below then they own the air space above. To that extent the tests, as an unnatural user without the prior courtesy of asking permission, are something to be avoided at all costs.

I would suggest strongly that if the tests continue the Canadian government should consider asking the United States to provide compensation for the infringement of the property rights of the native people through whose territory it passes. I understand the objections of the native people. It may not have been relevant in 1983 but the juridical conscience of the

Canadian people and others has evolved and I think we should be respectful of property rights of this sort.

My message is very clear on this. We are committed. It has been one of the main points in Canadian foreign policy formed by a succession of Canadian foreign ministers and distinguished ambassadors for disarmament. I recall General Burns, Doug Roche from the Conservative side and Alan Beesley, my friend who is a career civil servant. We led in nuclear disarmament. We should lead. We should encourage the American president who has a forward looking and constructive view there.

On the cruise missile test, I do not think it is a major issue. For nuclear disarmament groups I would recommend attention to the potential World Court project launched by the Ileana group. I would recommend attention to the concerns of our native peoples and on that basis I am prepared to continue to support the continuance of the missile tests at this time.

[Foreign Affairs, January 25th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, those are excellent suggestions.

The multinational force is closer to the letter of the charter, section 43, chapter 7. Unfortunately, this excellent suggestion is not often followed by the United Nations.

Clearly, political training for our soldiers should be recommended to the Minister of National Defence. It is the lack of political sophistication that really hampered their effectiveness. It would be an excellent suggestion to make to our defence minister.

[Foreign Affairs, January 25th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I congratulate you first all on your appointment as Deputy Speaker. You are somebody who knows Parliament and its history and who loves the institution. You will bring integrity, good judgment and compassion to your office. I congratulate you.

It is a matter of some sadness to me to speak on this debate. I have had the privilege of lecturing to the University of Belgrade, the Serbian Academy and to the University of Zagreb in earlier happy years when that was one country. It is one ethnic community but the cultures are widely different. Three hundred years under the Austro-Hungarian Empire make the lovely city of Zagreb as it was into an Austrian city with the architecture, the gardens, the parks, whereas Belgrade looks another direction.

The original era perhaps, the political era, was joining these disparate communities together in 1919. It was done by consensus. The Croat and Slovanian leaders of the period feared rightly that without a solution of that sort they would be given over to Italy. The whole Illyrian coast had been promised to Italy under the secret treaties of 1915 if it deserted the German alliance and joined the western powers as it did. So you had a basis for a union that was consummated in one of the Versailles-dependent treaties, the treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye which I will have occasion to refer to in a moment.

I do raise the issue though that here I think we have a political problem that, reversing Clausewitz, cannot be resolved by military means.

One of the problems here is that Bosnia-Hercegovina was not a situation ripe for solution by classic peacekeeping methods as devised by Lester Pearson. Peacekeeping is not mentioned as such in the charter. It is a gloss on it. When Mr. Pearson devised the concept it was based firmly on chapter 6 of the charter and not on chapter 7. What has happened basically in the Bosnia-Hercegovina situation is that we have escalated into a peacemaking situation which invokes another section of the charter, chapter 7, which does authorize the recourse to armed force but which the precedents indicate clearly that unless there is a consensus as to the political goals to be achieved by the military intervention then the situation is doomed to failure.

I think the problem for Canada, in some respects a tragedy for our military forces who are not responsible for that-they carry out the orders-is that personnel developed and trained for peacekeeping have been used for peacemaking. They neither have the military equipment available nor the sensitive type of political training that is required to carry out even peacemaking missions today.

In a pathological sense I suppose Somalia is the perfect example of how peacekeeping transforms surreptitiously into peacemaking and fails. I echo the sentiments of the member on the other side who raised the issue of the soldiers on court martial for the carrying out of orders as they saw it in Somalia when clearly the political intelligence was lacking.

We have to consider in terms of peacemaking and peacekeeping, the two which are now joined together, the roles and missions Canada is capable of performing. One thing that is very clear is that it is quite impossible to be represented in too many places at one time.

If we are going to be in Somalia and in Cyprus, we cannot be in Bosnia-Hercegovina and do the job rightly. So one of the things our committee on military affairs will have to consider is a more prudent economy in disposition of our forces and deciding the priority areas. This is something that in a period of budgetary restraint has to be considered very seriously.

My main thesis though is that Bosnia-Hercegovina represents an attempt to resolve by military means something that should have been resolved by political means. There was a time when Yugoslavia was breaking up. The problem of state succession in eastern Europe should have been foreseen and provided for in advance but was not any more than one had provided for the succession with the collapse of the Soviet empire and the

movement to a more liberal Russia. It was not foreseen. It was not provided for.

What one has had, and this explains the muddiness of the decisions from the United Nations as carried out by the main powers that must assume the responsibility for them, is a division of attitude among western foreign ministries. In fact, looking back one is reminded of divisions between western foreign ministries at the time of the Russo-Turkish war in 1877-78, at the time of the two Balkan wars, at the time indeed of World War I. You see the divisions between the Quai d'Orsay and the Wilhelmstrasse of those periods replicated in a milder form perhaps but still in the consequence it is the same in divisions as to the policy to be applied in Bosnia-Hercegovina. We are in the middle of that and that is a problem.

There have been criticisms made of one of the European foreign ministries that it precipitated the problem by premature recognition of post-succession Yugoslav states Slovenia and Croatia. I do not accept that criticism in relation to Slovenia and Croatia. They did have a separate historical existence as units of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Their frontiers are reasonably clearly defined under the doctrine of uti possidetis which is recognized in international law.

One has many more concerns about Bosnia-Hercegovina which did not really exist until 1878 and which always has had a high element of artificiality about it. I think it was an error to recognize Bosnia-Hercegovina and to admit it to the United Nations above all without taking the trouble to define what status it should have, what its frontiers would be, what its relations with its neighbours should be. I think this does come within the category of premature recognition and the political consequences with this.

The United Nations efforts through the Vance-Owen plan, noble but politically and may one say constitutionally and legally very naive predictably would end in failure.

I would wonder why our government committing forces to Bosnia-Hercegovina did not perhaps raise these issues of the necessity of a political settlement. Is the time for diplomacy past? Not in the least. It has not really been tried. Yugoslavia was put together in 1919 as a consensual union of the kingdom as it was called of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes by an international conference of which Canada was a part. We signed the treaty of St. Germain. It was our second international act and we are legal party to it.

I suggested in an earlier pre-parliamentary capacity as a private citizen, as an expert witness deposing before the United States Congress committee on foreign affairs, the House of Representatives, that the machinery of the treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye be revived. It is a still extant treaty. One needed a global view of the Balkans. One cannot isolate Bosnia-Hercegovina from the fate of other areas, including the former Yugoslav republic that calls itself Macedonia but perhaps should be called the republic of Skopje.

Peace in the Balkans as a whole is dependent on rational solutions in this area as in any other area. The failure was to recognize that post-succession Yugoslavia required a larger political consensus than Bosnia alone before you could safely and decently send military forces into it.

Therefore, I would have some criticism for our own governments in going in too enthusiastically and not asking the questions that European foreign ministries should have asked: Where they wanted to go and what their purpose was and which are present certainly in other fora such as the CSCE, NATO and the European community.

It is not too late for a Canadian initiative maintaining our forces in Yugoslavia and Bosnia until the limit but saying: "Look, a political settlement should come". Is it ripe? There is a time when parties to a conflict wear themselves out. Exhaustion takes over and that is when diplomacy takes over. There are some indications that that could be near.

In any case simply to maintain forces without pushing for a larger political solution, without telling the European Community countries: "Look, you have to get your act together. You have to give some signals of what you want to do". We cannot solve the Bosnia problem without solving the problem in Skopje, without guaranteeing the security of territorial frontiers without the Balkans. If we do not do this, we are back to 1878 and 1913-14. Santayana said that if you do not study history, then you make all the errors again. What is emerging is a sorry exercise in international diplomacy.

I think the big Canadian exercise is steering back to the United Nations the necessity for a larger political consensus, a larger conference of which if we follow the treaty of St. Germain route, we will be a part and we can speak out on this.

I do not think we can solve Bosnia without solving the other problems. Is it to be partitioned? If it is to be partitioned the frontiers will have to be defined. The treaty of St. Germain provides for the compulsory jurisdiction of the international court in these matters. It has the advantage in frontier definition of making an ally of time.

Peace is necessary. We have a basis for a settlement that will be viable and it is better then than casting blame on military forces. I think the military forces are not to blame and we have performed well.

[Speech From The Throne, January 20th, 1994]

Madam Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague for his remarks. I am very much aware of the flexibility of the Canadian federal system as I myself am a regionalist. I know we can make some important changes to our Canadian system.

I would not want to speculate on the initiatives being developed by our hon. colleague, but I know that there will be good opportunities for the growth of regionalism in Canada in the near future.

[Speech From The Throne, January 20th, 1994]

Madam Speaker, may I first of all congratulate you on your appointment to this distinguished office and through you the Speaker who we elected several days ago.

It is a significant fact that in a changing Parliament and in a changing Canada we are in the process of changing the House constitution, the rules. It indicates the basic fact of common law from which the law of Parliament is passed, that it is not a frozen cake of doctrine that gelled once and for all in some bygone age, but a continuing process of creative adjustment of old rules to new social circumstances.

We have seen changes that were not expected. The House has elected a Speaker for the second time, but in this particular election there were extensive meetings between candidates and the political parties: the Bloc Quebecois, the Reform Party and as a special suggestion of the Prime Minister, with the Liberal Party. Perhaps no votes were changed, but I think there was a profound educational process.

We are all better informed of the options of choice for the future development of parliamentary rules and procedures available to us. In the process of give and take there is a cumulative advance in our thinking because parliamentary constitutional law, as I said before, is not fixed in time. It is not graven on stone tablets. It evolves and it must evolve.

The precedents we received in the 19th century must be balanced against precedents from other ages, the 17th and 18th centuries, for example. In some ways these are much more dynamic and creative in terms of the evolution of English parliamentary constitutionalism. They also affected the American constitution.

What comes out of this is that this House will continue to build on parliamentary procedures, will continue to create new rules incrementally on the old. One looks forward to the co-operation of opposition parties in building a new and strengthened role for backbenchers and for committees. It is good to have the full co-operation promised by the Prime Minister and the House leader not merely in the election campaign but since so that we represent law in the making.

That is a signal event for us because of course the speech from the throne has two main thesis in it. One is the concept of change that we live in a period of transition, in a sense a world revolution of our times, of which the collapse of the Soviet empire and the fall of the Berlin wall were merely symbolic indications. Large changes are occurring and they affect Canada as much as anybody else. Our institutions must respond to those changes.

The speech from the throne picked up the thesis advanced in the Livre rouge of the Liberal Party that change must come, that it is inherent in our society. It should not be resisted. One should guide and direct it constructively.

The second main theme in the speech from the throne is also the notion that one cannot isolate social problems. The social scientists speak of the polycentricity of problems and problem solving. It simply means that individual problems are not islands to themselves. One cannot separate social problems from economic problems nor can one today separate internal problems from larger problems of foreign policy.

We live in a global village and what happens in far-flung areas of the world impacts upon Canada and upon our development. It is in that perspective that I approach my intervention in this debate.

I represent the constituency of Vancouver Quadra which has had the honour of having as its members a Prime Minister, my predecessor John Turner, but also a very distinguished Conservative foreign minister, Howard Green who lived to a very ripe old age after his retirement from Parliament. He is remembered for reinforcing a principle developed first by Prime Minister Pearson and Paul Martin Senior, the notion that Canada's commitment in foreign policy includes a concern for people outside Canada and a concern for human rights. Howard Green, if you will remember, took the initiative as foreign minister within the Commonwealth to raise the issue of race relations with a member of the Commonwealth, South Africa, and to say that a policy of openness and open society is and should be a precondition to membership in the Commonwealth.

And so I continue in that tradition. I must say one of the striking things in my constituency is that it mirrors the changes in process occurring in Canada as a whole. We have suddenly become a global community by the very happy fact of immigration and the integration of our new communities into Canadian society.

My constituency encompasses Greek Canadians. It also has Polish Canadians. Some came as war veterans after World War II. Some came to escape the dying days of an inefficient, incompetent communist regime. The boat people came 10 or 15 years ago and now have their children at college. There is a success story for you because they came with nothing. Our Indo-Canadian community and the Sikh community have con-

tributed so much to our cultural richness. Our Chinese Canadian communities have come from mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong and are united in maintaining a new plural Canadian tradition.

This in some way signals the growth and change occurring in British Columbia which was once traditionally preoccupied with forestry and industries with natural resources. They are still there. They are at the basis of our richness and the new dynamic and I would say, forward looking policies of management, a part of their present development.

However, it may have escaped the notice of people in other parts of Canada that we lead in scientific development, particularly in the area of the relationship of science, scientific research, advanced technology and industrial application which the Japanese perfected but which we are doing now.

The TRIUMF/KAON project is a monument to the new dynamism in British Columbia education and science and research. It groups together the great physicists of Canada and the world. It has attached to it as ancillary projects, geneticists like the Nobel laureate, Michael Smith. It has built a massive export industry which converts a company like Ebco of Richmond that once was a minor tool manufacturer into a multimillion dollar export industry for Canada with new jobs and new wealth contributing to the national well being.

Therefore British Columbia represents at once this meeting of the new communities in a larger community of communities. By the way that term, sometimes attributed to Canadian political figures, is that of Martin Buber. He was speaking from his viewpoint as a central European scholar who later went to Israel and saw the need for communities to work together. The new pluralism means every community is enriched in the process.

There is no longer, if there ever was, a problem of languages in British Columbia. It is the objective of parents whose children have mastered the cours d'immersion in the French language to move over to a third language. I think that may be the Canadian dream reflecting the new Canada and reflecting the new orientation to which British Columbia has contributed so much. The centre of gravity in the world community is moving from Europe to the Pacific and the Pacific rim and we are there.

Therefore we will be speaking out in caucus and in Parliament on the necessary recognition of the new role of British Columbia. We sometimes feel that bureaucrats and maybe even political leaders in central or eastern Canada are insensitive to these dramatic changes in the balance of power in Canada.

The important thing to remember here is that we have a view of federalism which corresponds to the view I expressed of the common law. Federalism did not gel once and for all in 1867 in a series of static relationships between institutions or a glorifying of old processes simply because they were there.

We accept Mr. Justice Holmes' view that it is revolting to have no better justification for a rule than that it was laid down in the time of Henry II. Henry II has been dead for so many centuries. Therefore we believe in the continual updating of federal institutions.

Federalism, as Prime Minister Trudeau said, is pragmatism. It is a process of constant readjustment of old institutions and rules to meet new problems. And so we have faith in federalism and the fact that our distinctness as part of the larger Canadian society can be reflected and translated into institutional and other changes within the Canadian Constitution and by a process of evolutionary growth that does not necessarily require formal changes to the constitution. The dynamic of constitutional growth in an existing society is that it comes through incremental change and adjustment in response to contemporary problems.

In this period of change in which we all live I have spoken of the movement of the world community, the shift in the centre of gravity from Europe to the Pacific rim. It is a fact of life. It means there will have to be new emphasis on trade and co-operation with Pacific rim countries.

However it also reflects one of the great dilemmas of the world community in a period of transition. We sometimes have the coexistence of the old with the new. It is sometimes a painful coexistence, even a collision.

We expect that the 21st century will see the ideal of a viable world government. It is not with us now. Therefore, one of the realities is the commitment that Canadians have made in foreign policy from the golden period of St. Laurent, Pearson and Paul Martin, Sr. to the United Nations has to be balanced against the recognition of the regionalism that exists within the world community as a whole.

It is good that the GATT discussions led to the suggestion for a world trade organization, but this is not for the first time. It was one of the hopes of the founding fathers of the United Nations in 1946 that there would be a world trade organization. It was the failure, in some ways the unexpected failure, of this project that led to the not very satisfactory compromise of GATT. But like many not satisfactory compromises it performed a necessary function and deserves credit for those measures that have existed since 1946 to prevent an autarchic system of international trade.

I come back to the basic point that to put all one's faith in a world trade organization and in GATT is not a sufficient remedy for the economic problems of our time. I have no doubt, in

historical terms, that the government has been right to put its faith in NAFTA.

The regional organizations, the trends of history, the movement of the European Community through the ideal of the single act into, in many respects, a closed regional community compels us to look for external markets wherever we can find them. I compliment both the red book, the livre rouge, and the government for the commitment to NAFTA. To be sure, there were international problems to consider, a thicket of problems that perhaps could have been considered more fully in the last several years. However, they are not insuperable. Treaties once made are not graven in stone. There are processes under international law for changing them to new circumstances.

I had occasion as a private citizen in another capacity to examine the issue of freshwater export in bulk, whether it was to be covered by NAFTA or not. My conclusion was clearly it was not covered by NAFTA but I appreciate the concerns of those Canadian citizens who thought it was.

On this particular point it seems to me that the solution adopted by the Canadian government, the exchange of statements, is adequate in international law to achieve that point of making assurance doubly sure on the water issue. Further possibilities for change exist on a similar basis. If we worry about what the United States would say, I would simply say that the United States government more than anyone perfected these methods of change in treaties, creative change after the treaty has been signed, sealed and delivered.

We move to this situation of a coexistence of mondialist, one world tendencies through the new world trade organization, through the development of GATT and through our creative membership in new regional organizations like NAFTA.

We should all commend the initiative taken by the trade minister to put out feelers to Chile, to new countries for membership in NAFTA to expand our trade opportunities. However we should also look carefully at associate membership for our Pacific rim trading partners, or trading partners to be.

One of the great advantages of the new Canada, the new pluralistic Canada, is that we have an enormous natural resource in our citizens who have come here from other countries. They have the language and know the customs in terms of trade and commercial relationships and these things should be used to the fullest. I expect in the expansion of the trade initiatives this will be acted upon by the government to the fullest.

In the general area of foreign policy the problems of living in an era of transition are obvious enough as they are in other areas. We would have to recognize that western foreign policy as a whole, after the period of creative growth, post war with the Marshall plan and those brilliant imaginative conceptions of a new world order have been somewhat lacking in imagination and forward looking thinking in recent years.

It is noticeable that there were no strategic plans in place to take account of the collapse of the Soviet empire and even Europe. There was a real failure to anticipate that collapse, yet it had been amply warned by all of the specialists.

There was also a failure to anticipate in the absence of a plan for state succession the would-be renaissance of national conflicts, of ethnic conflict of the sort which existed in southeast Europe before 1914 and was reflected in the two Balkan wars and in World War I.

One of our problems for Canadian foreign policy is that the golden era when we did lead the free world in new ideas, the golden era of the 1950s and 1960s, the St. Laurent-Pearson-Martin era, cannot be replicated any more. We were there because the colonization had not yet occurred. However, we anticipated it and we led the way to its peaceful application and peaceful development.

Our economic position was stronger in relative terms in the world community than it is now. Of course we could say this even more for the United States which is also in a more imaginative period of thinking in foreign policy than in recent years.

Some of the problems with which a new government and new Parliament is beset reflect from a failure to recognize the contradictions and to act on them in timely fashion. That is one of the challenges for a new government and a new Parliament.

In relation to peacekeeping which Canada invented-it was Mr. Pearson's achievement and he was a Nobel laureate on account of that-we have to recognize today too many disparate tasks in too many disparate areas. In some senses in the defence forces there is too much preoccupation with military hardware and not enough attention to the new and highly political role that peacekeeping involves today. I think there was a second failure to recognize the distinction between peacekeeping which we, Mr. Pearson and Canada, devised and peacemaking which involves the overt use of armed force.

These are some of the issues that we face now: the tragedy of Somalia, the tragedy of Bosnia-Hercegovina. These are problems that could have been anticipated and not really met-