Mr. Speaker, in response, I would say that we can do what we are doing now, which is standing up and loudly and clearly expressing the concerns of Canadians of Ukrainian descent, of which there are approximately 1.3 million, many of them in my riding, and Canadian Ukrainians across the country. We cannot stand by. There are measures we can take. We cannot take kinetic measures, such as invading Ukraine and measures like that, but we can certainly do other things. Those are all on the table. They do not necessarily play themselves out in public.
I go back to my previous life. When I was commanding an F-18 squadron in Europe, just before the wall fell, I took the members of my squadron on the ground to the Berlin Wall so that they could see why we were, in fact, deployed to Germany and why it was important that we, as Canadians, did what we were doing. There was silence. I cannot remember the name of the town. It was a little town in East Germany. It was dead silent. It was a town of about half a million people. We could hear dogs bark and the odd car, but it was otherwise silent. The place was virtually dead. That is what we cannot allow to happen in Ukraine.
We cannot be prepared to do it the way we were prepared to do it in central Europe at that time, but we can certainly do what we are doing today, which is standing up, loudly and clearly, and taking what measures we can, along with our allies, the Americans, the Europeans, and everybody else, to make it clear to Yanukovych and the thugs he works with and the thugs, frankly, he works for in other countries above his pay grade, that we will not stand for it. We will do whatever we can to make life better for the Ukrainian people.