Mr. Speaker, I would like to start by letting members know that I will be splitting my time with the member for Hull—Aylmer.
Despite the late hour, I will try to do justice to what I think is a very important topic before us this evening, Bill C-6.
I have to say that it is strange to be starting a speech in the dark of the night on something that could have been before us, and should have been before us, much sooner. This convention was agreed to in Dublin in May of 2008. It was signed in Canada on December 3, 2008. It actually entered into force in 2010, when I think 30 nations had ratified it. However, the first version of this bill was only tabled in the House of Commons in December 2012, which was 18 months ago.
We are now debating the bill under time allocation, suddenly, and I am not sure which time allocation it is, as there have been several since then. However, we are now up to about 75 time allocations. Again, it is a strange sense of priorities from the government.
What we have in front of us is a bill to implement an international treaty. The bill, now at third reading, is still very much in the same form as when it first came to the House. There has been only one small amendment, but I agree that it was an important amendment. Unfortunately, what we still have before us is a bill that contradicts and undermines the very international treaty it is supposed to implement.
Our official opposition foreign affairs critic, the member for Ottawa Centre, has tried very diligently to work with the government on this implementation legislation, all the way back to its original iteration as a Senate bill. He has been trying to make sure that it actually matches the treaty that we signed.
The member had a very practical suggestion, which was to take article 21 from the convention, the clause dealing with interoperability with non-party states, and get agreement to substitute it for clause 11 in the bill before us. It is clause 11, for me, that is the main problem with this legislation. However, it is less of a problem after the amendment than it was previously, because before that amendment there was a very serious problem.
The initial problem with clause 11 was that it would have allowed Canadian Forces to use cluster munitions in some circumstances. Therefore, I am thankful for the amendment, which the government agreed to, to remove that explicit permission for the use of cluster munitions. It is an important change. However, I have to say that when we think about the treaty we signed, it is hard to imagine how that ever got into the original draft of an implementation bill, because it was so clearly contradictory of the intent of the convention.
Still, even after the small amendment that took out “use”, the bill, under clause 11, would still allow Canadians to participate in and even command operations using cluster munitions as part of joint operations. To my mind, and I think to most observers, this clause still undermines the treaty, the purpose of which was to ban the use of cluster munitions.
Of course, New Democrats are not the only ones raising these concerns. They have been raised by international civil society groups, by Canadian civil society groups, and perhaps most tellingly, by the Canadian who negotiated the treaty on our behalf. The head of the Canadian delegation negotiating this convention, Earl Turcotte, resigned from DFAIT and has subsequently called the proposed legislation “...the worst of any country that has ratified or acceded to the Convention on Cluster Munitions.”
Most interesting to me is to remember the role of Canada at these negotiations. This role was in great contrast to our previous traditional leadership role when it came to negotiating weapons treaties. In this case, Canada's role was to try and get article 21 added to the treaty. This is the article that provides for interoperability with non-party states. Since Canada succeeded in getting that added to the convention, it is hard for me to imagine why the government finds itself in a position of creating even larger loopholes through clause 11 in the bill. Let us remember that 113 countries have signed the convention and 84 have ratified it.
Why is clause 11 there? I believe it has come out of an inordinate concern about interoperability with the United States and subsequently from a parallel concern about the protection of Canadian Forces members from liability when participating in joint operations that use cluster munitions.
There would be two ways to solve this problem. The way the government has decided to do it is to create a loophole that would let Canada out of its legal responsibilities. The other way would have been to conduct negotiations with the United States about joint operations to make sure that Canadians did not place themselves in a situation in which they would be in violation of the convention.
If we entered those negotiations, we would actually advance the goals of the convention and help try to bring the United States, or any other country that is not a signatory, under the convention. Instead, as I said, the government has chosen to create a larger loophole.
There is a list of 84 countries that have ratified this convention without seeing the need for loopholes like those in clause 11. This includes NATO countries like Spain, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and Italy. It includes traditional allies of Canada like Australia and New Zealand. It includes countries like Ireland, Sweden, and Switzerland.
As members on the other side have pointed out, some of these countries do have interoperability clauses in their own legislation. However, those clauses are consistent with article 21 of the treaty, and that means that their interoperability clauses allow participation in joint operations only when that participation does not involve assistance with acts explicitly prohibited by the convention.
What kind of weapons are we talking about here? These are weapons that can be delivered by a variety of means, by aircraft, artillery, or rockets, but what is most pernicious about them is that they release hundreds of small explosives over a very broad area. These devices individually are often as small as a battery. They are devices with a very high failure rate, up to 30%, which leaves a large unexploded ordnance problem behind. We know that 98% of the recorded casualties from cluster munitions have been civilians. This makes cluster munitions most similar in their impact to the problems left behind by land mines.
Land mines are phenomena that I had occasion to become personally familiar with some time ago. When I went to Afghanistan in 2002 as a human rights investigator, I was required to complete a high-risk personal security training course conducted by the British military. At that time, I learned how to recognize land mines and how to extricate myself from a minefield.
That was all theory until I actually arrived in Afghanistan. What struck me most was the very large number of people on the streets each day missing a limb, most of them children. Almost every day that I was there, we ran across more examples of civilians losing limbs as a result of those land mines.
Land mines later became a more personal reality for me when I was travelling across the country and we stopped to heed the call of nature. I went to step off to the side of the road, but luckily and helpfully our driver pointed to two lines of rocks on either side of the road delineating the boundaries of where mine clearing had taken place. Despite the hard work Canada had done to bring the world together to ban anti-personnel mines in the Ottawa treaty signed in 1997, five years later I found myself on the side of a road about to take a step too far.
As an international observer, I had the luxury of going home at the end of a four-month tour and not having to live every day with the threat and the impact of land mines.
I also had the privilege of going home very proud to be a Canadian whose country had played such a prominent role and such a positive role in trying to end the scourge of land mines.
Here I am late at night a decade later in a debate on cluster munitions that makes me much less proud to be a Canadian.
Let me be clear. I am not accusing members on the other side of favouring the use of cluster munitions, but I do think that their excessive concern with U.S. interoperability has led them to introduce legislation that leaves the door open to that use. It is not just about the use of cluster munitions by others, but it also leaves the door open to Canadian complicity in the use of these weapons.
It is bad enough, in my mind, to have worked so hard to get an interoperability clause into the convention itself, but it is still worse to provide larger loopholes like those provided in the language in clause 11 of the current bill.
Instead of, at minimum, sticking to the language that we already had inserted into the convention, we have, as I said, created a larger problem. That is why on this side of the House we worked very hard to try to get an agreement from the government to amend the bill to conform with the language of the convention.
Let us remember that cluster munitions do not just harm civilians. In 2006 in Afghanistan, 22 Canadian Forces members were killed and 112 were wounded by land mines, cluster bombs, and other explosive devices.
I look forward to the day when Canada returns to its traditional leadership role in weapons reduction and when we lend our weight to the total abolition of cluster munitions, instead of trying to tunnel loopholes through the convention.
We have here two competing values. On the government side the value of continuing co-operation with the United States and interoperability, and our common goal of trying to eliminate the use of cluster munitions. I believe the government has clearly placed the wrong priority on one of these over the other. For that reason, members on this side of the House will have to vote against a bill that otherwise might help advance a very worthy cause.
