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Address by the
Honourable Bryon Wilfert, P.C., M.P. August 4, 2009 Mr. President, Excellencies, delegates, ladies and gentlemen. It’s a great pleasure to be here today to address this body on the 30th anniversary of the ASEAN Inter-Parliamentary Assembly. This is a time for celebration, it’s a time for reflection, and it’s a time to move forward in terms of enhancing the role that parliamentarians play throughout ASEAN. We do not represent governments, we represent the people. The people, those who have no shelter, those who have no water, those who have no jobs, and most importantly, those who have no hope. That is the role of parliamentarians, and this organization has an opportunity to address those issues and certainly through the Charter. On behalf of my colleague Joe Day, we are delighted to be here to again observe. Now Mr. President, when we hear the word “observe,” that doesn’t mean that we’re going to sit back and simply take it all in. We want to be part of what we call the action. Canada has and maintains a very, very strong bond with this region. It is extremely important to Canadians that we share information and that we look at best practices, particularly in dealing with environmental issues, security issues, trafficking of human beings, and of course the issue of human rights. We want to congratulate Brunei Darussalam on its ascendancy as a member – a full member – of this body. I look forward to the day when my friends from Burma, Myanmar will be able to rightfully take their place, but until issues on human rights and particularly in Burma and the continued incarceration of Aung San Suu Kyi continue, that obviously is of great concern to us. We can’t say that we support human rights and say “but there’s human rights here which are different than human rights over here” and therefore we have a legally binding Charter now in ASEAN, we need to move forward and we need to help. We need to continue the dialogue, and Canada has always been a different voice on the North American continent. We are not the United States. We have a British parliamentary system. Our approach is different and we believe that engaging is critical in terms of moving forward with many of the key issues that you are dealing with. Over the next few days and particularly when we do the multilateral discussions with our colleagues on issues such as the environment, investment, trade, et cetera, we not only want to share with you what Canada is doing, we want to know how we can help you. We can’t tell you but we want to work cooperatively together because we want to see a strong ASEAN. A strong ASEAN is good for Canada and it’s good for countries around the world, and we’ve been very fortunate. This is my eighth or ninth time that I have attended these sessions and I can tell you that there’s always something new in terms of the friendships that you build, in what you take back and that sharing of information is absolutely critical. Canada has always believed strongly that in order to advance issues on economic on the economic front on the environment front, we must share information and we’ve seen issues in Vietnam such as Agent Orange and we have dealt with that issue and we want to share that with our Vietnamese friends. Tsunami – we’ve experienced situations where we can provide that kind of information in terms of early warning. It is extremely important that we do that, but as parliamentarians, again, we are not government, so as parliamentarians we have a unique opportunity to share information and to advance laws which will in fact benefit this region. We as a country have over 300,000 people who come here every year, 2,000 students that come. We’d like to see more students come from the ASEAN region to Canada, both in terms of university work, those from national assemblies and parliaments to come and to learn in Canada. We believe that we have the technologies that will advance in a number of cooperative areas, in the areas of agriculture and food, information and communication technologies, service industries, oil and gas equipment, mining and metals. The adoption of the ASEAN Charter in December 2008 has clearly provided ASEAN with the institutional framework to facilitate and enhance regional integration. More importantly, we are delighted to congratulate the most recent establishment of the ASEAN human rights body, providing a solid framework for the enshrinement of democratic principles and better protection and promotion of human rights which is fundamental – fundamental – in any society. Canadian parliamentarians recognize that in the era of global integration, security problems in this region affect us, there is a ripple effect, the lives of those in the country affected and we saw what happened regrettably in Indonesia a few weeks ago. That affects us. The sharing of information dealing with international terrorist organizations, the issues of threat to energy security, terrorist financing, health pandemics, arms and drug trafficking – it’s a very small world. I flew from Toronto to Hong Kong in fifteen hours and two and half hours to get to Bangkok. Now for some of you flying seventeen and a half hours not including layover might sound a bit staggering, but it really isn’t because the world is much smaller and these issues are our issues as much as they are yours. So Mr. President, we are very interested in the dialogue. We would like to see as a recommendation as I suggested to the Secretary-General last night at dinner that we start to look at specific themes where we can sit down and talk about issues as observer countries. This is because some of us come a long way and we’d like to be more active in working with you in partnership – in true partnership – in enhancing this very important region. So Mr. President we thank you again for the generous hospitality and warmth of the Thai people. We want to say that ASEAN matters greatly to Canadian parliamentarians, we are pleased that we have been an integral part of both ASEAN and certainly AIPA over the years, and we will continue to work collaboratively to ensure that where we can be of assistance on any of those issues, we will. Whether it’s through the Canadian International Development Agency, whether it’s in the issue of legal reform, whether it’s in the issue of enhancing what we would like to see of course is a free trade agreement with this region, we will be there. So again Mr. President, distinguished delegates, thank you for your attention.
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