Mr. Speaker, the nations of the world are on the brink of choosing one of two sad roads. As I said in previous speeches, if the world goes to war, innocent people will die; if the world does not go to war, innocent people will die. The difficulty for each of us as politicians, and indeed for every citizen of the world in their own conscience, is which of these two sad roads we should take.
As chair of the foreign affairs caucus and member of Parliament responsible to express the views of my constituents in Yukon, it is important that I rise again for the fourth time, I believe, to talk about this very serious situation.
I will start by commending my constituents who made their decisions of conscience one way or another. I commend the hundreds of them who wrote to me to express their desire for peace, their fear of war and the ramifications it would have. I commend those who led the peace march which I participated in and gave a speech at several months ago. I commend Will Petricko and the minister of the United Church in Whitehorse who organized an event at the church, upstairs and downstairs, both for prayer and to talk about ways to achieve peace.
Finally, I want to thank Will Petricko and other Yukoners who yesterday organized hundreds of Yukoners to light peace candles across the Yukon, in two locations in Whitehorse, in Dawson and in Haines Junction. I would like to say thank you to 10 year old Vicki at the vigil who said, “I would like to say peace to everyone here and peace to the world,” and to 11 year old Jannel who said, “Peace is nothing but a dream waiting to come true”.
Some of those who are so passionately worried may have said, God bless the Prime Minister, or at least they were very relieved when he said in his speech to the House of Commons today, to a standing ovation, that if military action proceeds without a new resolution of the Security Council, Canada will not participate.
This position by the Prime Minister, and those who applauded it, is one of significant courage. In some ways it takes at least as much courage to fight for peace as it does to go to war. It is certainly no easy event for any of us, to make a decision that may not be the most pleasing to our closest friend and ally, especially one that can have a great effect on the well-being of Canadian families, but a decision of courage it was.
It was also an expression of our sovereignty. The Prime Minister, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, many of my colleagues in the House and I have always made it clear that Canada will always make its own decisions. We always have and we always will.
Good friends have the ability to respect each other's different decisions and are still friends. In the Winnipeg Free Press on March 14 Ambassador Paul Cellucci described our relationship in the following terms:
The relationship that the United States has with Canada is our most important relationship in the world.
If you think about the impact in the day-to-day lives with U.S. citizens, no other relationship even comes close.
The relationship is in good shape. We're getting things done.
I respect the right of the few people who contacted me and felt that we should stand again by our friend and neighbour in renouncing the dictator who has murdered millions. Make no mistake about Saddam Hussein. He gassed 60,000 of his own people. He used weapons of mass destruction and murdered thousands of his own people in prisons and torture chambers. He caused a million Iranians to be killed or injured in war. The world will be a better place when Saddam Hussein is gone.
To put some context on the situation where often violence, murder and upset in the Middle East occurs, we remember that the Arab Muslim world in recent decades and centuries has had much pressure and upheaval.
Other religions have invaded from the west. Other religions different from theirs have taken some control over their lives, their regions or their neighbourhoods. At the same time some of their governments that have been created are dictatorial and do not espouse the common themes of peace and justice in their own religion.
It makes it even easier for some of the dictators to survive when their regimes are funded by western civilizations through the purchase of their oil. They do not need to go to their people through democratic elections to get the views of the people. They can hold this dictatorial power and perform acts that no citizen of any nation would be proud of.
Over the last few centuries one of the solutions that has arisen is a philosophy that they should return to the traditional, very extreme religious values to the exclusion of all others. Unfortunately some of the solutions to make that return would be through violence and terrorism. Those efforts have not been that successful to overthrow the secular, dictatorial regimes. Therefore perhaps some of them, such as al-Qaeda, have turned to another solution which is to make the western countries so angry that they would intrude into the area even more than they are now, causing the people, who are now peaceful or are now middle of the road and not our enemies, to rise up with the fundamental terrorists and become strong enough to overthrow those countries.
In this context I want to outline the reasons for my own decision and personal views in this particular situation. In politics, perception is reality. These events, the invading of Iraq, have to be perceived with the proper evidence. They have to be perceived by the hundreds of millions of Muslim people around the world and in the Arab world, many of whom do not understand that there is a clear and present danger that would require military force at this time.
If someone asked me to go to war, to invade because of specific dangers, for example weapons of mass destruction, I would need the existing evidence clearly outlined to me. It would need to be sufficient enough to convince me that a state is powerful enough to be a danger to us, that it has the means to endanger us and that it is not presently contained. I have not yet been convinced. I do not believe the inspectors are convinced and certainly the United Nations has not been convinced as a result of the resolution that the members of the Security Council have not yet passed.
I would like to speak for a moment in defence of the United Nations. There are some who are suggesting that this is not the United Nations' finest hour and in fact that it is becoming weak and irrelevant. I have to totally disagree with that.
As Winston Churchill said, democracy is a terrible form of government, but it is the best we have. In the same sense the United Nations is not perfect. It has made some dramatic mistakes in the past, but it has also done a tremendous amount of good. We should never stop trying to improve the United Nations. For example, people specifically refer to the Security Council with the veto of five members, which is why I am happy that Canada left its options open to the very last moment.
Had any of those five nations that have a veto exercised that veto in an unreasonable way, that would have dictated Canada's foreign policy. As I said earlier, Canada is always going to make its own decisions. We are not going to leave it up to other nations.
During this whole debate the United Nations has been at the forefront. The issue has been discussed day in and day out. The United States has been going to the United Nations. All the nations have been looking to it. The media over the last months and years have been focused around the United Nations. It has been the centre of activity to try to find a solution to a very difficult problem. If some nations act before the United Nations does, it does not mean the United Nations has failed. It means that those nations have made other decisions than what the United Nations has made.
The United Nations is made up of the member nations of the world. Those member nations in the United Nations have not been convinced that there is enough evidence and enough reason to embark on military force at this time.
Another reason for my own personal decision is related to innocent civilians in Iraq and innocent civilians and soldiers in neighbouring countries. I do not think anyone would argue the fact that Iraq would be a better place without Saddam Hussein, but exactly how does one do that? What does one do when the troops are surrounding Baghdad, a city full of millions of innocent people? How does one cause a change of a few people who are holding that horrendous dictatorial regime in place without the murder of many more innocent people?
Some of the other reasons upon which I based my decision relate to the ramifications of this, because it is not simply an attack on one palace, one country, or even one region. There are ramifications for the hundreds of millions of Muslims in the many Arab nations. The very complex interaction of religions and politics will have a much wider effect on the world and we have to view that effect. Simply, the fact is that going to war has a tremendous economic impact on all those nations. How many poor people will die in all the countries involved in a war, including the United States, because of lack of funds to feed the poor or fund health care systems?
A war will also, in my opinion, weaken the war on terrorism. The war on terrorism, that the Minister of Foreign Affairs so eloquently outlined today in which we are hand in hand fighting with the United States, is far from won. The terrorists we are fighting are not armies in specific regions; they are people who live in the apartment next door. They are very hard to detect. The goodwill and efforts of many nations around the world are needed to defeat them because they proliferate in virtually every nation on earth.
Some of the nations that are on our side, that are our allies right now, are helping us root out the terrorists. However, they are in very tenuous situations and on the verge of threat from fundamentalists. As I said earlier when talking about the history of the Arab Muslim world, they could be easily aroused by more incursions of the west.
If there is not sufficient rationale this could simply antagonize those people and give enough force to the fundamentalists trying to destabilize those governments. It could cause an overthrow in many nations that we depend on in the fight against terrorism. That would leave those nations as protectorates of the cells of terrorism where they could brainwash, train, arm and equip those small groups of people who live in that apartment next door to set off bombs and commit other terrorist activities in areas where peaceful families live, such as in North America.
Other reasons for my personal decision are the discussions I had with ambassadors or people knowing their positions in all the countries around Iraq.
Some countries, as members know, such as Iran and Kuwait, have been attacked by Iraq. These countries, out of them all, should be the most fearful of Iraq and its potential for weapons of mass destruction, especially since Iraq's missiles at the moment are very short range and can go no farther than the adjacent countries.
Not one of the ambassadors with whom I discussed this felt that military action was an appropriate solution to the situation at this time. If the people who are most threatened and who are the closest do not feel this is the way to solve the problem of Saddam Hussein, then Canada, a large ocean away, cannot see this as a clear and present danger.
When we upset a regime it is not simple to replace it with a perfect, or democratic, or better regime. One person does not stay in power in a country on his or her own. There must be support for the person. It is very complex to rebuild a nation, especially one with so many forces.
Iraq was never a unified country in the first place. What happens with a destabilization of the system and the collaboration of the Shi'ites in southern Iraq and in Iran? What happens with the tensions of the Kurds in northern Iraq and Turkey? What happens in the very scary situation of Israel and Palestine which many people believe have caused much of the dissent in the Middle East and many of the terror attacks that have resulted in the murder of people?
In the veil of a war against Iraq, what could happen in the Palestine-Israeli conflict? More individuals could be killed under the veil of this other threat and people would not even notice it. It could also accelerate to an extent that Israel gets involved in the complex inter-relationship. All sorts of nations are involved now in a horrendous conflict. It has spread far beyond the borders of removing one dictator.
This should be a happy day. We have made a sovereign decision that will make many Canadians happy. Without another United Nations resolution we will not participate in this particular war. However, innocent people will continue to die in Iraq while this regime is still in place and innocent people will die when this regime is removed. It is not a happy day in that respect.
What we need to do now is to look for solutions to remove all the causes of violence in the Middle East so that things like this will not occur in the future and that terrorism, which we are also fighting at this time, will not occur in the future.
We need to intensify our efforts to support education in the area. We need to intensify our humanitarian support. We need to work on the belief that we have, both at home and abroad in those nations, for religious tolerance and understanding, an understanding of the history that the people in those nations have been through.
We need to help build a world where the people in those countries can regain the pride they have lost, the pride in their citizenship that will allow them to stand up and create governments for which they can be proud.
If we do all of that, we will improve the lives of people in those areas and the world will be a better place for all of us, especially a world that is so connected that if something happens it happens to all of us.
As John Donne, a famous British parliamentarian and poet, said, which describes any deaths, any unrest or any unhappiness that occurs in the area, in referring to each of us:
Ask not for whom the bell tolls,It tolls for thee.