Statement by Canada to the Group of Friends of the Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty (FMCT)

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New York, USA, September 23, 2024

Delivered by Minister of Foreign Affairs Mélanie Joly, 79th session of the United Nations General Assembly High-level Week

Good afternoon,

Our thanks to Prime Minister Kishida and to Japan for convening the Friends of FMCT and for hosting us today to launch this initiative.

Canada looks forward to continuing to work together and build momentum toward a Treaty on fissile material for nuclear weapons.

The challenging international security environment reinforces the need for progress on nuclear non-proliferation, arms control, and disarmament. 

Achieving a world without nuclear weapons will require trust and political will. To build this, we need to take tangible, verifiable steps, including controlling and eliminating fissile material for nuclear weapons. A Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty is a critical step in this path.

What is urgently needed is an agreement among states that produce and possess fissile materials for nuclear weapons.

States that do not possess nuclear weapons, and that are party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), already have controls in place that amount to a de facto FMCT.

We hope that the Conference on Disarmament will be able to move this work forward. We believe it is the appropriate venue. However, given the CD’s lack of progress over the past 30 years, we must be open to other venues and format options for negotiation of a treaty.

To be blunt, we can no longer afford to overthink it or get stuck on preconditions, and

we need to begin negotiations.

The scope for a treaty should be determined by the states during negotiations. Rather than try to address everything at once, we must be flexible and creative in our thinking and not rigidly insist on one approach. Progress may be incremental, and result in successive treaties or protocols between participating states as they build confidence and move forward on verifiably addressing fissile material production and stocks.

This Friends of FMCT initiative can help by calling on all states that possess fissile material for nuclear weapons to do three things:

• adopt moratoriums on the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons;
• engage in transparency and confidence-building measures with each other, facilitated by the UN; and
• come to the negotiating table ready to do the heaving lifting necessary to achieve a treaty.

Thank you.