Well, Minister, that assessment is not.... The department's and the government's view seems to be that everything went really well during that evacuation. In fact, I quote will from the government's response to the Special Committee on Afghanistan's report:
With respect to the crisis in Afghanistan...the Department of National Defence/Canadian Armed Forces...established an effective and efficient working relationship with GAC and the Department of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada...which allowed for the safe evacuation of nearly 3,700 evacuees from Kabul....
That assessment is troubling, because it is wrong. We heard from dozens of witnesses who said that the evacuation from Kabul was an uncoordinated mess.
Retired Major-General Dean Milner indicated that bureaucracy at Immigration Canada and leadership coordination issues made it very difficult for the Afghan strategic evacuation team to support and assist the mission.
Wendy Long, who is the director of Afghan-Canadian Interpreters, said the following in reference to the IRCC, Global Affairs Canada and the Department of National Defence:
All...have to work effectively [there], and that's not what was happening all along. There was no effective partnership. They were not looking at it as a mission that all three entities should have been taking part in for the end goal of getting our people to Canada.
It's troubling that the government views the evacuation and interdepartmental coordination as a success when the facts say otherwise. It's all not supported by the fact that we evacuated far fewer people proportionately than did our allies. We evacuated 3,700 people to the end of August of that year. The United States evacuated 122,000 people, and the United Kingdom evacuated 15,000 people. On a pro rata basis, by U.S. standards we should have evacuated 12,000 people. We evacuated 3,700. By U.K. standards we should have evacuated 10,000 people. We evacuated 3,700.
I guess my point is that if the department and the government are not willing to acknowledge that the evacuation from Kabul and from Afghanistan in general was a disaster, then in future crises nothing will change. We'll continue to repeat the same kinds of mistakes.