Thank you, Mr. Chair.

On this side, as the official opposition, let's start with a couple of things. This isn't about who can say they support the troops more than any other. Mr. Baird, you wanted to have a different tone. I'll go down that path. This isn't about who can have the highest rhetoric and ballyhoo. This about our job as parliamentarians in providing transparency.

Frankly, unlike our friends down the way, the Liberal Party, we wanted to have accountability and transparency at the beginning, for the very reasons that we have concerns right now. We wanted to have a debate and a vote in Parliament on the deployment of our troops. So what did we get, Mr. Chair, from our government at the beginning? I went with Mr. Garneau, with Minister Baird, and did a fact-finder. We didn't hear from one person in the meetings to send in air strikes. They didn't ask us to put in special troops. They asked us to help with the peshmerga, yes, and humanitarian assistance. That's what our policy was. That's what our amendment to the motion was, and our party put an amendment to the motion because we disagreed with the direction.

But we could not get from our government how many troops were going. You remember that, Minister? There are hundreds. We finally got 69 out of you and our Prime Minister, but we couldn't get what they were doing.

Also, I'll have to suggest, with respect, that we're playing semantics, when the Prime Minister says we're not going to accompany and we're accompanying.

It must confuse the heck out of you, as the Chief of the Defence Staff. My heart goes out to you, because at the end of the day when you have soldiers on the ground in the front lines, whether you call it a combat mission or not, they're in combat. We just heard about that. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it's a duck. It is about soldiers in the field. They're in combat.

We're trying to get some honest answers and some transparency. What's the cost of the war? We went down this path in Afghanistan when we sleepwalked into Kandahar without having a defined mission and proper parliamentary oversight. That wasn't your fault; it was the previous government's fault, but let's learn some lessons.

So if we don't have clear answers from you, our Prime Minister, and then our Chief of the Defence Staff, the men and women—I agree with Mr. Norlock—whom we put into harm's way are left to try to figure things out on their own. That is not correct. We need oversight.

To that end I want to ask you, Mr. Nicholson, if you understand why we need to have stronger oversight in the mandate. You need to be clear about the cost of this war, like our allies the U.K. and the U.S. have costed the war. When you don't put parameters on where our soldiers go, they will end up in combat and firefights. That's your job: to make sure it's clear, because right now it's not. Why not provide us with some clarity on the cost of the war and the parameters our soldiers are going to have in theatre?

Paul Dewar

Transcript

Discussions (0)