Honourable colleagues, I rise today as the critic — a friendly one — of Bill S-225, An Act to amend the Prohibiting Cluster Munitions Act (investments), which was sponsored by my colleague, Senator Ataullahjan.

Colleagues, this important bill is about money — the money of Canadians; your money and mine. It’s a bill about clarity for investors and about accountability. It’s a bill about limiting and ultimately eliminating the horrific damage, mostly to civilians, done by a certain class of weapons. Ultimately, colleagues, this bill is about global responsibility and humanitarian leadership.

Colleagues, I would like to start off by bringing this topic closer to home. As far as I can tell, cluster bombs have never been used on North American soil. But a weapon with some similar characteristics and impacts has been used in cases of domestic terrorism in the United States.

Colleagues, do you remember the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing when two bombs went off near the finish line, instantly turning that location of athleticism and excitement into a gruesome scene of bloodshed and chaos?

At approximately 2:49 on the afternoon of April 15, two pressure cooker bombs loaded with nails and ball bearings went off, killing two women in their twenties and an eight-year-old boy, while more than 260 other people were wounded. Sixteen people lost legs, with the youngest amputee a seven-year-old girl. The devastating impacts were both immediate and long-lasting for the people affect that day.

Now, colleagues, with that human devastation in Boston in your minds, transport yourselves back to the Vietnam War era. Colleagues, just imagine the situation between 1964 and 1973 for the farmers, small business owners, school children and the elderly people of Laos when the United States Air Force and the CIA’s own airline, Air America, as part of its secret war, dropped two million tons of ordnance — more than all the bombs dropped during the Second World War — decimating that country and its people.

Laos is the most bombed country in the world per capita. The U.S. dropped the equivalent of a planeload of bombs every eight minutes, 24 hours a day for nine years. By 1975, one tenth of the population of Laos, or 200,000 people, was dead and twice as many were wounded. It is estimated that at least 25,000 people have been killed or injured since the war because of unexploded cluster bombs — people trying to eke out a living in their rice fields or children innocently playing with these shiny objects.

A cluster munition, colleagues, is a container filled with small submunitions. The container may be a shell, a rocket, a missile or another device. It is dropped from aircraft or fired from the ground. It opens up in the air and releases a carpet of submunitions over a large area.

The submunitions, or bomblets, are often the size of a tennis ball, and are actually fairly similar to those pressure cooker bombs used in Boston in that they are packed with more than 300 pieces of metal designed to destroy human targets. The blast of one submunition can cause deadly shrapnel injuries in a 65‑foot radius and injure anyone within a 328-foot radius.

Colleagues, we now have documented cases of cluster munitions being used by the Russians in their war in Ukraine, including the shelling of a railway station in Kramatorsk, killing at least 50 civilians, including children, and injuring many more.

Photos from Ukraine indicate that unexploded submunitions now contaminate residential areas of Kharkiv. Shopping mall parking lots, city streets and residential areas are now contaminated with these deadly, unexploded weapons.

In the 2020-21 period, cluster munitions were used in Syria, and by Armenia and Azerbaijan in the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh. Since the end of the Second World War, at least 23 governments have used cluster munitions in 41 countries, some using them on their own citizens.

The U.S. has used cluster munitions in Cambodia. I mentioned Laos. They have used them in Vietnam, Grenada, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Yemen.

In addition to using them in Ukraine, Russia has used cluster munitions in Chechnya, Afghanistan, Georgia and Syria.

There are 16 countries, colleagues, that produced cluster munitions, including the U.S., China, Russia, Iran, Israel and North and South Korea.

Colleagues, with that background and context of cluster munitions, let’s turn our attention to Canada and to this bill, Bill S-225.

Canada participated in the Oslo process that produced the Convention on Cluster Munitions, and advocated for strong provisions on victim assistance and on international cooperation and assistance.

The process and the substance of the convention were modelled on the Ottawa Treaty that banned anti-personnel landmines in the late 1990s. That was a significant international diplomacy achievement for our country, Canada.

Canada signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions on December 3, 2008, and ratified it on March 16, 2015, with it coming into force that September. The convention prohibits the use, production, transfer and stockpiling of cluster munitions. It also requires the destruction of stockpiled cluster munitions within eight years, clearance of cluster munition remnants within 10 years and assistance to victims, their families and affected communities.

The Convention on Cluster Munitions has a total of 110 states parties as well as 13 signatories who have yet to ratify it.

Canada has never produced, nor has it used cluster munitions, although we did purchase them. In accordance with the convention that we have signed, Canada destroyed its stockpile of over 13,000 cluster munitions and 1.36 million submunitions.

Colleagues, the bill we have before us today is a bill which would amend Canada’s Prohibiting Cluster Munitions Act.

When Parliament passed Bill C-6 in 2014, there was much criticism from a number of MPs, senators and from Canadian and international expert civil society organizations. The International Campaign to Ban Landmines — Cluster Munition Coalition called it the worst legislation of any state party to that convention. Colleagues, critics have found Canada’s legislation to be flawed on two counts.

First, critics said then — and they still assert now — that Canada’s cluster munitions law allows for Canada to participate in military operations where cluster munitions are used with other countries which are not signatories to the Convention on Cluster Munitions, including the U.S. — a close ally of ours. This is something known as military interoperability.

Observers indicated that there had been a long, drawn-out, interdepartmental battle largely between the then-Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade and the Department of National Defence, and that a political decision was taken supporting the Department of National Defence’s position on this provision in the law, which ultimately passed on November 6, 2014.

That’s the first area of concern. But that’s not what this bill is about.

The second area of concern related to our existing cluster munitions law is the omission of a clear and explicit — and I underline “explicit” — provision for prohibiting Canadian investment in companies manufacturing cluster munitions or their components.

Domestic and international critics indicate that Canada’s legislation fails to meet the standards of the historic Convention on Cluster Munitions that it is supposed to uphold, and they are surprised that the Liberal government did not act immediately to clean up the law when it came into power in 2015.

Colleagues, the bill we have before us, Bill S-225, addresses one of those two loopholes in our current prohibition of cluster munitions legislation — that matter of investments.

This is the second time Senator Ataullahjan has tried to address this important gap by introducing legislation amending the Prohibiting Cluster Munitions Act.

In 2017, Senators Ataullahjan and Jaffer and former Senator Hubley spoke in favour of the previous Bill S-235 at second reading. The Senate actually referred the bill to the Standing Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade, but it did not progress from there.

Senators, as stated so clearly by our colleague Senator Ataullahjan in her recent second-reading speech:

Bill S-225 aims to bring the Prohibiting Cluster Munitions Act in line with the spirit of the convention. By explicitly prohibiting investments in cluster munitions manufacturing, we would set clear guidelines for Canadian financial institutions . . . .

We know that some of these institutions welcomed this idea over a decade ago. Bill S-225 also closes other related loopholes by prohibiting Canadian financial institutions from loaning funds to the manufacturers, and it prevents them from acting as a guarantor for their loans.

So, colleagues, you might be asking yourselves — as am I — what Canadian companies are these that have been investing in these cluster bomb manufacturers in the U.S. and other countries? Might I, through my investments, be inadvertently causing Canada to be in contravention of this important convention, and might I also be unwittingly contributing to the pain and suffering of innocent people in other countries?

Colleagues, where does the proverbial buck stop?

In the most recent Stop Explosive Investments report issued in 2018, seven Canadian companies had been identified as investors — and I said “had been” because we don’t know who is today — in cluster munitions producers. These are: Power Financial Corporation, AGF Management, BMO Financial Group, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Scotiabank, Sun Life Financial and Toronto-Dominion Bank.

In 2016, four Canadian companies, CI Financial, Manulife Financial, Royal Bank of Canada and Sun Life Financial, were identified as being in the so-called Hall of Shame for investing in cluster munitions producers. In that year, the group tracked $12 billion in investments by 49 global firms. Canada is not alone in this.

An updated list of companies should be available in the Stop Explosive Investments report to be released later this year, and it will be very important for all of us to have a look at that report. Let’s hope that more companies have moved over from the Hall of Shame to what they have also developed, which is called the Hall of Fame. I’m confident that there has been some movement.

Colleagues, I would like to commend Mines Action Canada, the Cluster Munition Coalition, PAX, Human Rights Watch, the International Committee of the Red Cross, Humanity & Inclusion and all organizations working hard every day to prevent future cluster bomb atrocities, to clear the significant, unexploded ordnance in many regions of the world and to ensure care for victims.

Shining a light on the investors and companies producing these weapons and supporting them to move out of the so-called Hall of Shame into the so-called Hall of Fame is a critical part of this important work. Who would want to do this? I’m sure our Canadian companies don’t want to be there.

Colleagues, Canada has a proud history of working with its international partners to create a more peaceful, humane and just world. Preventing human rights abuses and protecting lives is what drives Canada’s interest in shaping and joining international efforts to regulate weapons.

In addition to the Convention on Cluster Munitions, Canada is a signatory to other international conventions and agreements on a whole variety of weapons, including biological and toxin weapons, chemical weapons, certain conventional weapons and anti-personnel land mines. Canada is not currently a party to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

Bill S-225 seeks to improve the way Canada meets its obligations under the Convention on Cluster Munitions. Colleagues, with cluster munitions being deployed in several regions of our world today, and with the flaws identified in our current law, it is time to move this bill along to committee for further study and serious consideration.

Honourable colleagues, before I conclude, I would like to share a quote by renowned Nova Scotian pacifist, feminist, community activist and member of the Order of Canada, the late Muriel Duckworth, who said:

. . . war is the greatest destroyer of human life, the greatest polluter, the greatest creator of refugees, the greatest cause of starvation and illness. . . . .

I don’t know how you reach people who are making money out of making war, who are getting prestige out of making war, who are exerting their power and are getting more power by making war.

Honourable colleagues, with this bill Canada can stop the flow of Canadian money to the manufacturers of these horrific instruments of killing and maiming, and, hopefully, we can influence our international peers by our actions. Ultimately, this is one more step toward saving innocent lives and preventing human suffering.

I can’t think of a better reason to move a bill forward. Let’s move this forward, colleagues.

Wela’lioq. Thank you.