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House Hansard - 121

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
October 31, 2022 11:00AM
Context: House Hansard - 121 - Oct/31/22
Ms. Elizabeth May (Saanich—Gulf Islands, GP)
  • Oct/31/22 6:42:53 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I rise this evening to pursue a question I initially asked in the month of May relating to the upcoming June session, the first session, of the conference of the parties within the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. I asked the question as to whether Canada was going to attend. I was following up on a question from the hon. member for Edmonton Strathcona, who had just asked a similar question. The hon. Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs in his response said that the Government of Canada was going to maintain an unwavering commitment to nuclear disarmament. In the end, Canada did not send a delegation to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. We did not even send an unofficial delegation of observers. This was a profound disappointment to the community within Canada that is looking to the government to stand up and work against the threat of nuclear war. We have had a nuclear non-proliferation treaty in the world since 1970. We had historic progress made. At the time the United States was under President Ronald Reagan and the then-nation of the U.S.S.R. was under Mikhail Gorbachev, they decided together to work to eliminate nuclear weapons. We have had significant backsliding since then from both the U.S. government and, of course, the U.S.S.R. is no longer. Mikhail Gorbachev, God bless and rest his soul, is no longer with us. The appallingly militaristic and brutal dictator within the alleged democracy of Russia, Vladimir Putin, is now bringing us closer to the threat of nuclear war than we have been at any time for very many decades. I note that, as time has passed before I could pursue this question, ironically today's date places us very close to the anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis, which took place in late October of 1962. Here we are in 2022. What have we learned and what have we done? We must do more to end the threat of nuclear war. As we look at Canada's role as a member of NATO and what is happening right now with Vladimir Putin mentioning specifically the potential threat of using nuclear weapons, that must be denounced so strongly at all times. We know one of the reasons the U.S. government put forward to oppose the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons was that it could “delegitimize the concept of nuclear deterrence upon which many U.S. allies and partners depend”. That is something for us to actually focus on regarding the importance of signing on to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, that it would, in the words of the U.S., under former president Donald Trump, “delegitimize the concept of nuclear deterrence”. That is certainly something we should support. We must delegitimize the notion of nuclear war, nuclear deterrence or nuclear strikes, if we are going to have a peaceful world. There is no question in my mind, and I will be interested in what the government representatives say to this tonight. Had we pursued aggressively the work we should do as a non-nuclear state without being so subservient to our nuclear state neighbour, as we did in the Ottawa Treaty to ban landmines, we could perhaps have kept the world much safer from Vladimir Putin.
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