Mr. Speaker, what an honour it is to be here for this debate. I will be sharing my time with the Minister of State for Western Economic Diversification.
Let me begin by observing that I doubt there are any of us on this side of the House, pilots, business people, former police officers, who relish the prospect of passing this resolution with its provisions for air strikes and for sending the Royal Canadian Air Force back into combat. This is something that every government does reluctantly, only after considering every possible option and excluding more peaceful courses of action.
We on this side of the House understand that Iraq itself has seen far too much bloodshed. It was the scene of countless conflicts over centuries when it was the buffer zone between the Ottoman and Safavid empires. Just in the past hundred years, since Ottoman sovereignty ended, we can think of the fighting there during two World Wars. We can think of the bloody coups under Iraq's kings. We can think of the depredations of Baathist dictators, then the Iran-Iraq war. It was one of the forgotten but most destructive conflicts of the late Cold War period of the 1980s.
In fact, Canada's first combat mission after Korea was to this very region. It was the Gulf War in 1990-91 at the tail end of that terrible conflict that brought Iran and Iraq so many casualties and deaths. We fought then, as we are proposing to do now, with coalition allies to release a country from the murderous grip of a dictator. In that case it was Saddam Hussein.
In 2003, our country did not take part in the American invasion that led to the insurgency that continues in Iraq to this day. Iran's influence has expanded into Iraq over the past decade. Al Qaeda's deadly poison has spread from Pakistan to Iraq. Now we have the Taliban in Pakistan who have just officially joined forces with the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. Now we face a new threat, specifically violent terrorist networks determined to spread and disseminate their hatred within our societies.
In contrast to the views of the previous speaker, the member for Toronto—Danforth, this is not, and should not be described by anyone in the House as, a fight of west against east. This is a fight of humanity over darkness, of Arab countries against terrorists that threaten their very existence, and of all civilized people against those who would deny the very foundations of civilization.
I believe that our Prime Minister expressed the general sentiment of our fellow Canadians last Friday in the House when he said, “...our country, and its allies, share the obligation and the burden that is incumbent on all free peoples: that of rising up against global threats...”.
This government's response to genocide and brutality has always been clear. It has always been a response of principle, and in this case, it began long before ISIL had raised its black flag. In 2009, Canada began one of the largest and most effective resettlement programs in our history, and on a per capita basis, the largest resettlement program for Iraqi refugees in the world today. Many had been out of Iraq since 2003. Others had sought refuge in Syria, only to find that country's peace shattered by a civil war after 2011. All had seen murderous factionalism at first hand. They witnessed the hunting down of minorities, the rape of girls, and the horror of blood-soaked revenge.
They have also witnessed a practice that horrifies Muslims in Canada as much as it does the citizens of peaceful law-abiding Arab states in the Persian Gulf, which is the killing of non-believers on the basis of a decree by maniacs who call themselves the leaders of this organization.
When that type of genocidal butchery has taken place, whether in central Europe in the late 1930s and early 1940s, or in central Africa and the Great Lakes Region in the 1990s, Canada has always responded to that darkness with light. It has responded to that horror with its best effort to bring hope to those who have otherwise faced death.
Those who have been resettled in Canada and other countries are a small fraction of the millions who are internally displaced, or those who fled Iraq as refugees to Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon, and Egypt. They are Armenians, Kurds, Shia professionals from Karbala, Sunni tribesmen from Nineveh, Mandaeans, Yazidis, Chaldean Catholics, Syriac Orthodox. They make up an ancient diversity that is on the verge of obliteration by a modern wrecking ball.
Canada has resettled nearly 19,000 Iraqi refugees since 2009. Our goal is 20,000, with 5,000 more Iranians and Iraqis still to come from Turkey. Only the U.S. has had a larger program in absolute numbers. No country has been more generous or strategic in seeking to protect Iraq's vulnerable minorities. We on this side would like to pay particular tribute to the private sponsors all across the country, without whom such a program could never have been possible.
Moreover, there is no zero-sum choice to be made between Canada's humanitarian imperatives and its military duty. On this side, we choose to open our doors to the persecuted while striking to eliminate factories of violence in Mosul, Ramadi, and elsewhere. We choose both the ambulance and the firefighters because we know this is the only way to help the millions who have been affected and threatened by this conflict.
How could we in good conscience do otherwise? How could we take in 20,000, yet ignore the plight of millions who face a fate potentially worse than the nearly 200,000 Syrians who have died since 2011?
In fact, military action to support Iraqi and Kurdish forces on the ground is the only contribution with the prospect of curbing this killing spree. The best thing we can do for refugees is to take action with our allies, to take action with the professionalism of the Royal Canadian Air Force to stop the depredation of ISIL in Iraq and to stop the killing.
Why are we here today? How did we get to a place where air strikes and military advisers were needed to stop ISIL? The answer is simple. It is because of neglect and inaction. It is because of the neglect that Vladimir Putin championed when he did his chemical weapons deal in Syria. It is because of the sense of abandonment that Iraqi forces and awakening councils endured when their funding was cut by foreign partners only a short time ago. As U.S. leaders, including Hillary Clinton, acknowledged, it was the neglect of Afghanistan after 1989 that ushered in civil war, the Taliban, and then al Qaeda.
We are now in a race to ensure that the neglect of Iraq and Syria's civil wars do not result in any disaster comparable to or, God forbid, greater than 9/11.
It has never been the habit of governments in this country, when air power was needed to stop these threats to international peace and security, to take these options off of the table. It is an urgent question for this side of the House as to how the Liberal Party of Canada, which sent the Royal Canadian Air Force to Kosovo without a UN resolution, sent so many of our troops to Afghanistan in 2002-03, and endorsed our military mission in Libya, is now saying, when an even greater threat has emerged, that all of these options are off the table.
The Liberal Party is saying that combat is something Canada does not do, that we are the ones who stand on the sidelines when our allies have decided to act under the leadership of a U.S. president, in this case President Obama.
We do not recognize the Liberal Party of Canada today in their position. We understand the NDP's pacifism, its unwillingness to take military action. That perhaps has something to do with the fact that the NDP has never been in government.
There is a threat today to Iraq and to the Middle East. There is a direct threat to Canada and Canadians through the menace of ISIL through the menace of terrorism, which unfortunately remains international, with its bases in many places.
We on this side of the House are determined to be generous to those in need, to--
