Jean Chrétien

[Iraq, March 19th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, they do not want to have an answer, so I will not reply.

[Iraq, March 19th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, talking about change of regime, they did that in the opposition and they went from 25% to 9% in the popular vote.

[Iraq, March 19th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I do not think at this moment it is the same situation because the question of when he committed genocide against the Kurds with chemical armament at one time, it was at the beginning of the 1990s.

I am going back. I said the United Nations has never debated the change of regime. Why not change the regime in North Korea? Why not change the regime elsewhere? We will never stop. The question is that--

[Iraq, March 19th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, the debate has been on elimination of the armament of massive destruction. The resolution of the United Nations was on that too. It was not for a regime change.

When we went to Kosovo, it was not for a regime change. It was to stop the genocide. Milosevic was replaced by his own people when he was defeated at the election.

Therefore the debate is about disarming Saddam Hussein. The process was working. The Americans felt that it was not working fast enough. We disagreed with them and we took action in consequence.

[Government Contracts, March 18th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, we sent a letter to the former minister of finance. He received all sorts of letters and when he saw in any letter that it could be causing a conflict of interest, he delegated the authority to his junior minister and it was for him to decide accordingly. He knew his business. I did not know. I wrote to him and he sent the correspondence to the one who was authorized to make a decision under these circumstances, and it was the junior minister.

[Government Contracts, March 18th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, the Minister of Finance of the day had delegated the responsibility of making decisions on this file to the junior minister in his department and it was according to the rules. He did not want to make a decision himself and he asked the junior minister to make a decision for him.

[Iraq, March 18th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, he knows what happened at that time, that when we went to Kosovo it was to stop genocide. It was not to have a change of regime. In fact, after the bombing was over and peace had been restored, the people of Serbia kicked out Milosevic in an election. The activity was not for a change of regime. It was to stop genocide.

[Iraq, March 18th, 2003]

In 1990 we voted in favour of the resolution of the government of the day because it had an authorization from the Security Council. I have said that all along, that they needed the authorization of the Security Council. On resolution 1441, nobody has clearly established that the inspectors had terminated their work and rendered a final judgment on that. They might think that they were right, the Americans, but I think that for us we thought that more weeks of inspection would have resolved the problem.

[Iraq, March 18th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, the government came to the conclusion that nobody has established clearly that there was no disarmament proceeding in Iraq at this time. We have, over the last few weeks, heard the inspector say that there were no nuclear armaments there. There was the destruction of the missiles that was in processing. We have suggested clear points to be debated within a certain number of weeks to make sure that biological and chemical arms of mass destruction were to be checked, found and eliminated, but they decided to proceed before this at--

[Iraq, March 18th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, as far as their position is concerned, I can state clearly that it is not justified. Had it been justified, and backed by a Security Council resolution, we would have said yes. When we said no, it was because we believed they had not made a case for the necessity of waging war on Iraq at this time.