Madam Chair, I will be sharing my time with my former seatmate, the member for Vancouver Centre.

It is getting late, and I note that at the end of this week is the beginning of the Olympics. There will be one nation out of all the nations in the world that will not be allowed to compete under its own flag, and that is the Russian nation. The Olympic committee finally got sick of all the corruption, doping, cheating and lying that was coming out of the Russian government and will not allow Russian athletes to compete under their own flag.

This is what we, meaning the family of nations, the universe of nations, including Canada, the U.S., the U.K. and Ukraine, deal with on a daily basis, because nothing happens in Russia without Vladimir Putin's express permission. When he says there might be 100,000 troops on the Ukrainian border or that they are just exercises and there is nothing to see, it is just nonsense and no one should really pay much attention because he does not speak the truth very often.

I was once privileged to spend some time with Senator Lisa Murkowski. She has available to her a map of the Arctic. I do not know if it is available publicly, but it is like looking at the Arctic from 50,000 feet above the North Pole. What it shows is the remilitarization of the Arctic by the Russian government, with all of the refurbished old bases and all of the new installations as well. While Canada, even from that map, is far away from the Russian bases, the U.S. is very close, at the Bering Strait, as are Finland, Sweden, Greenland, Denmark and Norway. The remilitarization of the Arctic, in my judgment, is what contributes to why it is in Canada's best interests to fully participate in the Ukrainian repulsion of this Russian aggression.

Henry Kissinger once said that nations do not have permanent friends or enemies; they only have interests. Regardless of whether one is Ukrainian or not, or whether one has diaspora in one's community or not, in my judgment it is in Canada's best interests to fully support Ukraine.

Russia routinely launches massive cyber-attacks on Canada, the last one being at a hospital in Newfoundland. It is nothing but a mafia shakedown:

“If you pay us millions of dollars, we'll let you have your hospital back.”

Russia routinely steals significant amounts of industrial and commercial intellectual property. Russian oligarchs have purchased significant pieces of industrial and commercial property in order to burrow deeply into Canadian society, and that money has been generated from very dubious sources. Russia is quite skilled at the game of misinformation and disinformation.

There are many, many more reasons why Ukraine's security is our security and our security is Ukraine's security. I would ask members to cast their minds along the eastern European flank to western Russia, because if Ukraine goes, the next place to go is Poland and the Baltics. When we get past Poland and the Baltics, we get to Finland. After Finland is Sweden, Norway and Denmark, and suddenly this is at our border.