For my friend from London—Fanshawe, the claim has been made repeatedly in debate this evening that the exact language was used in the anti-landmines law as is used in Bill C-6. That is not correct.

Laurie Hawn: I did not say that.

Elizabeth May: That is what I heard, Mr. Speaker. If the member for Edmonton Centre could wait a moment, I have heard him say repeatedly in this House that the same language was used.

In fact, the language is very different. The language that is used in the anti-land mine convention and the law that was passed by this House, says the following:

The question would be, if I were able to put a question to the hon. member for Edmonton Centre, is that if the same language were good enough for the anti-land mine convention, why did we not use that language in the cluster munitions law?

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It is not quite midnight, but it is late. I would like to ask my hon. colleague, on behalf of those of us in the opposition benches here tonight, what we, as parliamentarians and Canadians united, can do to support those Ukrainians who want nothing more than what we enjoy here in Canada: the right of free speech, the right of democratic assembly, and the right to align themselves with the cause of democracy and freedom.

Laurie Hawn: 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.

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