Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise today on the discussion about the report from the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade entitled, “The Russian State's Illegal War of Aggression Against Ukraine”.
As Canadians know, Conservatives have always stood with Ukraine. Those who have had the pleasure of hearing at committee some stories from my personal history will have heard that, back in 1991, when the Soviet Union was collapsing, I was the senior adviser to Canada's foreign minister.
I can remember the weekend that I spent on the phone with the Prime Minister's Office, the Privy Council Office and former deputy prime minister Don Mazankowski, the first Ukrainian deputy prime minister of Canada, discussing what we should do. The Soviet Union had not quite collapsed, and Mikhail Gorbachev was trying to institute his glasnost reforms. It looked like, within a few weeks, there would be a collapse.
We had a long discussion about recognizing Ukraine first. We were the party that recognized Ukraine on that weekend, December 2, and we were the first country in the world to recognize Ukraine as an independent country, separate from the old Soviet Union. That was a momentous thing because, of course, we have a large diaspora of Ukrainians in Canada. I am proud to have played a very small and minor role as a senior adviser to the then minister of foreign affairs, Hon. Barbara McDougall, when we did that.
We do support all of the recommendations in this report, but I would like to draw attention to a couple of particular interest to us. The previous speaker spoke about recommendations 12 and 13, and I will come to that, but I would like to focus a little on recommendation 8, which says:
That the Government of Canada work with its international and domestic partners to improve the coordinated implementation and enforcement of sanctions against Russia, by working to identify all assets connected to designated persons and closing any loopholes that may exist.
There are a lot of loopholes that still exist today. Not to toot my own horn, but I worked on creating the legislation the Government of Canada still uses today back in 1991, when there was the coup in Haiti. We wanted to impose economic sanctions, globally through the OAS and then through the UN, on Haiti and the illegal coup of Haiti's first democratically elected president.
There was no power to quickly impose economic sanctions. We quickly created within about four days a piece of legislation that was introduced and passed unanimously through the House and Senate within about 48 hours to create a bill that gave the Governor in Council the power to quickly move and impose economic sanctions.
We know these sanctions are leaking, and I have raised this before in committee. I said it as a member of the fisheries committee. While the government has targeted specific individuals, and all of those are justified, what it has not done is looked at the leakiness of the sanctions overall. I have an example that has had a very large impact on Atlantic Canada. The snow crab fishery is a very big fishery off Newfoundland, and 52% of the crab fishery caught in Newfoundland was, until this war happened last year, bought by Japan, through contracts.
When the war broke out and Russia was desperate for cash, it started to sell their snow crab at a much cheaper price on the global markets. Most countries respected the fact that that money would be used for fuelling Putin's illegal war and did not bite. Japan did bite, broke every contract in Newfoundland and stopped buying all their snow crab from Newfoundland. Now Japan buys most of their snow crab from Russia, helping to fund their war.
The minister and the Liberal government have never raised those kinds of issues with counterparts. We have raised them with the minister, and the minister was totally unaware that this had happened.
It is not unusual for a Liberal minister to be unaware, but one would think that, when we are dealing with sanctions in a war, it is not just about the individuals but is about the flow of cash that is going in by buying goods of our G7 allies.
I would also like to comment on recommendation 12, which reads, “That the Government of Canada not grant a sanctions waiver to Siemens Energy Canada Limited for Nord Stream 1 pipeline turbines....”
Remember, with the turbine, Russia did this fake thing about needing the turbine for the pipeline that brought natural gas and oil into Europe. It brought in a need for repair, and the government said it was no problem, to bring it in here and we would repair it. Then the war broke out and Russia said it wanted it back in order to facilitate the continued supply of that oil and natural gas, supposedly. The government acquiesced, granted a waiver, sent it back to Russia and allowed it to continue to ship oil and natural gas to fund its war.
In fact, if we look at some of the testimony in this report, it quite clearly shows that a number of witnesses were flabbergasted the Government of Canada would allow such fakery to happen.
In addition, in a rare moment of clarity on the liquefied natural gas issue, the Minister of Natural Resources said at the time, and this is from page 31 of the unanimous report, that he could not “overemphasize the depth of concern on the part of the Germans, but also on the part of the European Union, with respect to the potential implications associated with their effectively not being able to access natural gas.”
The report goes on:
In addition to the concerns expressed by Germany and the EU, the Minister [of Natural Resources] noted that, in conversations had with the United States, “they reflected and shared the concerns about the divisions that could end up undermining support for Ukraine....”
That was the Liberal minister, but yet when the Chancellor of Germany came to Canada and Germany was begging for our natural gas to deal with the issue of the impact on energy supply in Europe because of this illegal war, the Prime Minister said that there was no business case to ship it oil.
Maybe there is a case to get it done because there is a war on, but of course we were not ready to do that. When the Prime Minister and these Liberals came to power in 2015, there were 15 LNG plants on the books. As they progressed with their agenda, their no-pipelines bill, Bill C-69, or the “no capital bill”, as I call it, to drive capital out of Canada, we have how many? I am sure there are members here who could tell me how many have been built since those 15 were proposed and going through the environmental system.
I hear a colleague say zero. Maybe the true answer the Prime Minister should have given the Chancellor of Germany is that he messed up and that he was not ready to deal with the issue of making sure good, clean, ethical Canadian natural gas could be accessed by Europe, which has become totally dependent on Russia, in case of emergencies. Unfortunately, that was not his answer. He glibly said that there was no business case for it. I am not sure the Prime Minister has actually ever read a business plan, but he told the Chancellor that, and so Germany went and obtained the natural gas it needed from dirty dictatorships. That is the great foreign policy we have had.
My colleague mentioned the fact that if the Liberals were truly interested in supporting Ukraine, they would have put provisions in the free trade bill to enable and foster the ability of our country to supply more munitions to Ukraine and to manufacture them. In fact, if there is a gap in political risk insurance by the EDC, it is easy for the Government of Canada to show its commitment to Ukraine by using the Canada account to help Canadian munitions manufacturers located in Germany and deal with the risk insurance issue.
Have the Liberals used the Canada account to do that? No, so their commitment to Ukraine is, like all other things, fairly superficial and not done with the seriousness one would expect from an ally of an important democratic country in this world and of our diaspora of 1.5 million Ukrainians in Canada who expect more from the government.
