RESPONSE TO TERRORIST ATTACKS  (Bloc Motion)

Tuesday, September 25, 2001

 

    Mr. Bill Blaikie (Winnipeg--Transcona, NDP): Madam Speaker, I thank my colleagues in the Bloc for bringing forward the motion. It gives us an opportunity to debate and discuss the role of parliament in the issue that is now before us as a country and before the world, which is to say the act of terrorism that was perpetrated upon the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11.

    I will begin by agreeing with the right hon. leader of the Conservative Party who said this morning by way of a point of order that he felt the Prime Minister should have made a commitment to come into the House of Commons today after his visit to Washington to make a statement with respect to the nature and result of the meeting he had with President Bush.

    I hear a Liberal member saying that is what question period is for. This reveals an ignorance of parliamentary tradition. It was quite common in days gone by for prime ministers and ministers to make statements to the House of Commons after significant meetings pertaining to events of significant interest to the House. Certainly the Prime Minister's visit yesterday with President Bush would qualify.

    If that does not qualify for a ministerial statement or a prime ministerial statement in this case, what would? It seems that one of the ways the Liberals could make good on their rhetoric of consulting parliament would be to do that kind of thing.

    I must say in all fairness to the right hon. member for Calgary Centre that when he was minister of external affairs in the 1980s, during the years when I was his opposition critic, he made use of ministerial statements to involve opposition parties and particularly opposition critics in the ongoing debate about issues as they arose in the area of foreign affairs.

    I would echo his demand this morning that the Prime Minister consider doing that later today under routine proceedings and that ministers of the government in general with respect to the issue, when there has been a significant meeting or development, not wait for take note debates or question period which is by its nature sometimes not the most educational forum.

    Sometimes a ministerial statement, with a considered response on the part of opposition critics, would serve the Canadian public much better in determining the position of the government and the response of the opposition with respect to particular concerns.

    The debate about the role of parliament in this regard is an ongoing debate. Unfortunately any study of the role of parliament when it comes to foreign affairs will find the Canadian parliament and the Canadian parliamentary tradition particularly deficient when it comes to this area of concern.

    We in the NDP support the motion and think it would be appropriate that the government come to the House for a debate and a vote before the deployment of Canadian troops or any element of the Canadian armed forces.

    With respect to my comment about the deficiency of the Canadian parliamentary tradition in this regard, I am reminded that Canada was the only country of all the NATO countries that did not have a debate in its parliament about the enlargement of NATO.

 

    That was a very significant development with respect to European security architecture and the role of NATO in the world generally. Yet, I believe Canada was the only country out of 15 NATO countries that did not have a debate in its national parliament. I think 13 out of the 15 countries were required by their constitutions to have debate. They have it written into their constitutions or into their political traditions and rules that any such significant decision can only be taken with the advice and consent of their national parliaments.

    Even in the U.K., which has the same parliamentary tradition as we do, the government saw fit to have a debate in the house of commons as to the wisdom or lack thereof of enlarging NATO. It was only in Canada that this thing could be passed by order in council without so much as a reference or a whiff of parliamentary involvement. That is wrong and it is something which is fundamentally wrong with our parliamentary tradition.

    The Minister of National Defence just a few minutes ago got up in the House and said that this was our practice. Yes, it is our practice, but is it a good practice and is it a practice that the government should consider changing if it is serious about consulting and involving parliament? I would certainly recommend to the government that it take the motion much more seriously than it is.

    I recall that at the time the Minister of National Defence cited a number of precedents where recorded votes were not taken on things. However one of the more recent precedents, if he wants to talk about practice, was the gulf war. There was a motion and a vote in the House of Commons. I remember it very well. The government of that day thought it was important to have parliamentary approval, not just a parliamentary discussion but approval, of the action that it took at that time.

    If I remember correctly, the Liberals at that time did not object. In fact they probably pushed for it. Here we see the same pattern of inconsistency between what the Liberals ask for and push for when they are in opposition and what they do in government.

    The Minister of National Defence claimed that all the Liberals were abiding by practice. They are abiding by their own practice. They are abiding by the practice that they established. He as much as admitted this when he talked about what the practice had been in the last eight years.

    They are abiding by their own practice which they established, which is that all that parliament gets to do is to have these take note debates. I suppose these debates are better than nothing, but perhaps they are not if they establish the false impression that parliament has been consulted in as meaningful a way. I think Canadians would like to think their parliament has in fact been consulted.

    To not have a vote is particularly strange. When the minister of defence spoke earlier he said that government had to act and that it was accountable to parliament for its actions. Strangely it would seem that when it comes to these kinds of things this is the only kind of issue on which the government is not accountable to parliament. Technically speaking, we vote on everything else down to the last jot or tittle of government spending.

    We have had before us in the life of the House of Commons many occasions on which to vote on many things, which are infinitely less important and infinitely less grave than a decision by the Canadian government to deploy Canadian Armed Forces, and in so doing to become involved presumably in some larger effort, whether it is the Gulf war, or the campaign against terrorism or whatever.

    Why is it that on these kinds of issues the Liberals want to argue that we can vote on everything else, but when it comes to something really important, forget it? When it comes to something that important , the government reserves the right to make decisions without allowing parliament to express itself in the way that it normally expresses itself. It is not as if the motion calls on the government to do something extraordinary or unusual?

    All we are asking for is, when it comes to something like the deployment of the Canadian Armed Forces, that parliament do what it ordinarily does when it comes to legislative actions taken by the government, which is to have a debate providing an opportunity for individual members of parliament to not just put their views on the record in a take note debate but to vote one way or the other. That is what the motion calls for, and that is why we support it.

    We support the motion not just for this occasion, but in the context of our overall criticism of the Canadian parliamentary tradition, particularly as it has been practised by the Liberals since 1993, a tradition which has seen the increasing diminution, if it is not a paradox to talk about increasing diminution, of the role of parliament when it comes to foreign affairs and a decreasing use of the House for ministerial and prime ministerial statements. We should not have to rely on question period for an opportunity to deal with these things appropriately.

    I also want to say something with respect to what was said by the Alliance members when they were on their feet just before me. They referred to last week's debate on the opposition day motion brought forward by the Alliance. They had a particular take on that debate, which I do not want to let stand unchallenged.

    If I remember correctly, I think the member for Portage--Lisgar said that the Alliance and the Conservatives supported a motion to have the government act on terrorism, the implication being that because the other parties did not support the motion they were not as concerned as those two parties or did not want the government to act or have the committee look at it.

    The fact is there were repeated opportunities during that day to try to get the Alliance, and even the Conservatives who were involved in this, to accept that what the House would agree to was to have the whole subject matter of terrorism, and the measures needed to combat it, referred to the justice committee. Many times people sought unanimous consent on the floor of the House of Commons, myself included, to have the motion before the House withdrawn and to have a different motion put forward that would refer the subject matter of terrorism and what could be done to combat it to the justice committee. The Alliance refused to have that done.

    We should not play those kinds of games as to who cares more, but they mentioned it. I want to set the record straight that there was unanimity in the House with respect to the need for referring that matter to the justice committee. What there was no unanimity on was the list of measures which the Alliance attached to their motion, which by so doing had predetermined, in a way that was unacceptable to at least three other opposition parties, what the committee would discuss or what the outcome of the committee process would be.

    I wanted to make clear what happened last week, that there was some divergence of fact between what the member for Portage--Lisgar reported to the House and what actually happened.

    Having said that, I would like to reiterate that we support the motion. We think there should be more and better involvement of parliament in these decisions. It was not an accident that I said more and better involvement of parliament because if the government is to take parliament into its confidence and deal with it in a way that is more appropriate and more inclusive than what it has in the last eight years under the Liberals, then there is also responsibility on the part of members of parliament to reciprocate and to not look for opportunities to score cheap political points on the government in debates about matters this serious.

    Again, I think of my Alliance colleagues in this respect. It seems to me that if we listened to them we would think that everything that happened in New York and in Washington on September 11 was somehow Canada's fault. As far as we know, these terrorists, by and large, were living in the United States. They were training in the United States to do these things. It is unfortunate that the intelligence community in the United States and in Canada were not able to determine what was going on and do something about it. However, it is not a failure of Canada any more than it is a failure of the United States and everyone else who is involved. Why this self-loathing by which it somehow becomes Canada's fault that it happened?

    There are things we could do better. It is fair on the part of the Alliance members to point to out that there are things they asked for in the past that might not have been done. Why are they not bad-mouthing the United States administration for all the things that it did not do up until now? They may say it is because they are the opposition here and not there.

    However, the fact remains that what is needed here is not to grind political axes but to identify the problem and suggest ways in which the government could improve upon its policies with respect to things that would prevent terrorism. That is certainly what I would urge all members of the House to do.