I think it's extremely important, and perhaps we could have some testimony before this committee from Norine MacDonald, a Canadian woman and a lawyer from Vancouver, who heads the Senlis Council and presented this yesterday with very disturbing footage of children who clearly looked like pictures we haven't seen since the Biafran famine. She personally visited there and was told that they'd never had a single morsel of food from the Kandahar base, which they could practically see from where she was standing. They never had any supplies or emergency relief of any kind.
To clear this up, I hope we can come back to it, but I take it as a serious gesture on your part, Mr. Minister, that you want to get to the bottom of this.
If I could pursue this line of questioning a bit, it's very difficult when you make the assertion that humanitarian reconstruction efforts are at the absolute core of this Kandahar mission, when in fact every bit of information that we've been able to glean through every possible attempt would indicate that for every dollar spent on the humanitarian and reconstruction effort, nine dollars are being spent on the military effort. I'm wondering if you can shed some light on this.
Specifically, I know you can't be expected to have all these statistics in your head, but I wonder if you could supply to the committee a breakdown of the numbers of personnel currently deployed in Kandahar, and within that, the breakdown between how many are in the PRT units, both regular and reservists, because my experience was that there were more reservists in the PRT teams. I'd like to know whether that in fact is the case.
Also, you've made repeated references to the numbers of humanitarian agencies in the area, and yet we've heard many NGO reports that they have simply felt it absolutely necessary to evacuate the area, because they feel that the manner in which the effort is being conducted makes it simply too unsafe to deliver that humanitarian aid. They feel the lack of safety is generated by the militarization of aid formula. Nobody questions the need for a multi-purpose, comprehensive approach of development, diplomacy, and defence, but there have been many concerns raised about how out of balance this is and how much danger is actually created by the approach that is now being taken.
I wonder if I could ask you to elaborate on that.