Mr. Speaker, I noted that the Prime Minister opened his debate with reference to a Winnipeg Sun headline of March 27 purporting to be about a speech that I delivered in that city the day before.
The Winnipeg Sun published this correction on March 29, and I quote:
The headline on page 6 Thursday to a story on federal Conservative Leader Joe Clark's speech in Winnipeg did not accurately reflect the story's contents. The Sun regrets the error.
That correction was sent directly to a Jim Munson, whoever he is, of the Prime Minister's press office, on March 31. Therefore the Prime Minister knew the statement with which he opened today's debate to be false. He knew it was false. He chose to start a debate on a critical international issue by deliberately repeating a falsehood.
What is so troubling about this is how typical it has been of the government's response to questions or to criticism from all parties, with all our disagreements here on the opposition side. For two weeks now serious questions by serious members of Parliament in all parties in opposition have been put and the government has not answered with answers. It has responded with insults, as it did again today. What that indicates is a sure sign that the government is ashamed of its position and a sure sign that it cannot defend its position on its merits.
Canada says that it will not participate in the war. It then knowingly sends Canadian soldiers on exchange to war zones. The Prime Minister might not participate but he is quite prepared to put the lives of Canadian soldiers at mortal risk. That is the height of both hypocrisy and irresponsibility. The great joke is that Canada is acting on principle. The Prime Minister's only principle is to avoid taking a position.
We were once known as a country that acted on principle, not just on polls or domestic popularity. War is always inhuman. The real issue with this war is whether it is legitimate in international law. Serious scholars disagree on that issue.
In the absence of formal legal opinions from Canada's government—I asked but it would not provide them—I believe that existing Security Council resolutions give the legitimacy of the United Nations to this intervention. I accept the considered view of the Government of the United Kingdom that the combination of resolutions 678, 687 and 1441 provide the authority required. However, for the Government of Canada, the question of principle does not matter.
The foreign minister says, and repeats, that for moral, principled Canada, it is not a matter of determining whether military action is legitimate or otherwise. What if we had said that about Tiananmen Square or about South Africa, or about human rights?
Canada was once a country that set the highest standard of respecting international law, but the government does not care whether the action is legal or illegal. We have blown away one of Canada's most important and distinctive credentials.
The real issue today in Iraq is not about war. It is about the best way to improve the prospects of peace and stability after the war. Canada can play a major role. Instead, once again we seem to be stepping aside.
The government has announced $100 million in humanitarian aid, and that is a good start. Individual Canadians are making our own contributions, although relief organizations say those contributions are slower and smaller than needed.
However, humanitarian aid, while essential, is very different from reconstruction. War takes things apart. Reconstruction pulls them back together. It is more than food, more than aid, more than building dams and more than building roads. It is the sensitive work of healing open wounds, of reconciling sharp differences and of encouraging institutions which the Iraqi people themselves will see over time and for the long haul as being legitimate institutions.
The question is: Who can best lead reconstruction in Iraq? As a practical matter, the choice is between the United States, which has a team and a plan in place, and the United Nations which needs the authority of a new Security Council resolution before it can act.
On March 27, Canada's ambassador to the United Nations, Mr. Heinbecker, said that we wanted the United Nations to have the authority and to lead reconstruction. Since then there has been absolutely no evidence at all of any follow up action by Canada. There was none in the Prime Minister's speech today, not a mention, in a situation where Tony Blair found it urgent enough to fly from London to Washington to make the case for the UN, and when the Australians sent their highest spokespeople to Washington to make the case for the UN.
When the case for the UN was being made by presidents and prime ministers throughout Europe and Asia, the Prime Minister of Canada, instead of using the opportunity that he already had to go to Washington to make that case, cancelled his trip. He was either afraid to make the case to the Americans or his excuse was that he really believed that it was not a suggestion one makes in a time of war. Well, when in the world does one make that kind of contribution?
If it was controversial for Canada to sit out the war, it would be unconscionable for Canada to stand back from reconstruction. As I have said, France, Britain, Australia, Germany and a host of other countries have argued forcefully for a lead UN role. They have spoken through their premiers, their presidents and their prime ministers. By contrast, our quiet intervention was by an ambassador, a skilled ambassador, but an official, not an elected leader.
While Tony Blair found reasons to go to Washington and make the case directly to the president, the Prime Minister found reasons, as I said, to cancel his trip.
When I and other members of Parliament put questions in Parliament about reconstruction, they are answered by the minister responsible for international development, not the Prime Minister, not even the foreign minister. Her response is about aid, not about reconstruction.
I pray that the government will recognize the unique influence that Canada could have, both in building consensus about a UN role and in the reconstruction itself, a reconstruction that requires precisely the skills for which Canada is and has been celebrated around the world.
The stakes are dangerously high. Both Iraq and the region are turbulent. War deepens those natural tensions, those suspicions, those ambitions. Fairly or not, the Arab “street” believes that the Americans' real interest is oil. The deadly impasse between Israel and the Palestinians is an open wound.
Moreover, some influential figures in the Bush administration are thought to believe that they can use the aftermath of war to build, in the Middle East, regimes that are more like America in their value systems and in their institutions.
In those circumstances, the Pentagon, for all of its skills, is bound to be seen as the engine of attack and not the instrument of reconstruction. Yet, unless clear authority is given to the United Nations, reconstruction will fall to the Pentagon by default.
The British have not been inactive. The British, for at least three weeks now, have been travelling the world trying to identify the names of prominent world leaders who may be able to head up the kind of UN effort that will be needed. They have been making their case directly, on several occasions, most recently yesterday, face to face with the President of the United States.
Kofi Annan, the Secretary General of the United Nations, has himself already designated an esteemed Pakistani diplomat to play a lead role in the United Nations operation.
Canada is not on the Security Council, but no one in the House would doubt the influence that we have on countries that are on that council or, indeed, on other member nations of the United Nations that could influence a decision taken by the Security Council. Of course, it will not be easy.
The Americans want to contain the British for reasons that one understands. Since they had the courage to go in and to take the lead in the war, they want to have as much an imprint as possible upon the reconstruction. They must be persuaded otherwise. A compelling case must be made. But that case will not come out of the air. That case must be put forward by a respected, strong, international country like Canada. We should be doing it, and there is no evidence at all that we have lifted a finger in that regard. We are sitting out the peace, just as we sat out the war.
Right now, we should be in touch with countries that have reputations like ours; Nordic countries, for a start. We should be working closely with Japan, which has skills on peacekeeping and institution building. We should be in touch with South Africa, which is the most recent society to have successfully faced the problem of a divided internal community and has, through its truth and reconciliation commission, found a way to begin the healing process in a way that bore a South African accent, not the accent of something imposed by some other power. We should be building consensus for United Nations action and we should be doing that now.
Reconstruction, obviously, must start by building order. There is a war on. There will be conditions of war for a certain period of time. Some members of the House might not like it, but the reality is that in the early days after the conflict is formally over, the principal role in maintaining a simple system of order will fall to armies, the United States army, the United Kingdom army and the army of Iraq because it is one of the national institutions which enjoys respect through that country.
We cannot blast away everything that is there. We must take what we can trust, obviously changing the leadership, but take the structures that are there that we can trust to establish a basic elemental order, whether that is civil order normally assigned to police or whether it is a larger order normally assigned to armies. But stage one, the army stage, the Pentagon stage, should be over as early as possible.
Then we must get to the second stage, the stage of building confidence, rebuilding a society, and reconstruction. That must be carried forward by the United Nations.
There is a need to draw together communities that have never been together but have been drawn more desperately apart in recent days. There is a real need to heal the wounds of war. There is a fundamental need, a need in which Canada can play a primary role, to establish a kind of federalism that might work in a society of that kind, a federalism based on regions not on culture or religion, to build institutions that flow naturally from the traditions and the needs of the Iraqi people. Those are things that we are good at and that the UN is good at. They are not things that armies are good at. So there needs to be, in this second stage, a real emphasis upon that work of reconstruction. We should be making that a Canadian priority here.
I admire the Minister for International Cooperation. I envy her portfolio. It is one of the most interesting portfolios in government and she does it well. However, she cannot speak for the government or the country on the question of reconstruction. For one thing, the government alone needs to draw in the larger Canadian communities. There are non-governmental organizations with immense talents in this regard. There are experts in institution building across this country. There are people who are prepared to go themselves or to send money to help in this project.
I am reminded, and some members of the House will remember the parallel, of a different kind of crisis to which Canada responded when famine struck Ethiopia. Instead of simply responding in the normal governmental way through CIDA or through the Department of Foreign Affairs, the government of that day established a special cross-departmental project led by a former colleague of mine, the hon. David MacDonald. It had a capacity to draw upon non-governmental organizations. By its very nature it demonstrated that this was a matter which was of particular importance to Canada.
To whom might we turn if we were to establish some kind of urgent Canadian task force on Iraqi reconstruction? I can think of some names from the public service offhand. I think of General John de Chastelain, who has performed excellent service in Ireland in circumstances that are not terribly dissimilar. I think of Margaret Catley-Carlson, a distinguished former deputy minister of health and former president of CIDA, who herself has headed international agencies dealing with children allied with the United Nations. I think of Huguette Labelle, a former chair of the Public Service of Canada, a former president of CIDA, and a distinguished Canadian public servant. That is just the beginning, and that is just from the public sector. There is a range of Canadians who could be drawn together if the government had the will to have Canada play a major role in reconstruction.
Let me raise one other matter that is of great concern to myself and to others. I alluded to the view among some in the Pentagon that this opportunity of post-war should be seized to try, not only in Iraq but elsewhere in the region, to establish a regime of values more like America. I consider that to be a prospect full of problems. It is something that we must deal with.
Last week, a former colleague of mine, a former secretary of state in the United States, and a person clearly prominent in the senior ranks of the Republican Party of the United States, James Baker, came to Toronto to spell out a vision of reconstruction that was very different from that being proposed in certain corners of the Pentagon. It is one that is more similar to the Canadian tradition. I found it interesting that Secretary Baker did not go to London. He did not speak to Paris. He came to Canada. He came to the one country that he knew was most likely to be inclined, and to have the capacity and the influence to mobilize this kind of alternative.
The world is faced with a real choice between what the United Nations can do in reconstruction and what might be left to the Pentagon. There is a division of view in the United States at its most senior levels. If we were looking to reassert our reputation with our neighbours, if we were looking to reassert our reputation as a country that could count in the world and change the world, this would be an ideal opportunity. We have the skills and the influence. There is an urgent need to do it. It is a by-product of doing what we should be doing as a country. In the world's interest we could materially improve our reputation with our neighbours, whether they know it or not, who need our help on this issue. We can certainly improve our reputation in the world and help make a material contribution to reconstruction in a land which, if it is left as things are now, could simply slide into some new kind of chaos.