Citizenship and Immigration Committee on March 29th, 2023

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Minister.

I want to provide some context for my questions.

My husband is an American combat veteran, and he served in Afghanistan. It was something to watch his reaction to the fall of Afghanistan, from my campaign office, while many of my constituents were pouring in with requests for Afghans' evacuation and while the government was in caretaker mode.

That's something.... I'd like to get you on the record that it's not a situation our country should be placed in again.

[Anita Anand, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

First of all, thank you for telling me this very personal and emotional part of what you were experiencing in 2021. Certainly, I knew your spouse served, but I didn't know many details, so thank you for sharing that with me. I thank him for continuing to step up. I think it's a global service that people are actually doing.

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Going forward, though, has anything been put in place, so that, if we have another duty to evacuate a country, there would be advice given to the PMO, perhaps, when they were considering triggering an election?

In terms of recommendation 8, has there been any formal advice that, perhaps, it wasn't a great idea to go to an election, knowing the country was about to fall to the Taliban?

[Anita Anand, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

I can only say that it was an extremely difficult and unpredictable situation, and nobody recognized that Kabul would fall so quickly.

There are so many lessons to be learned. Indeed, after every operation, the Canadian Armed Forces takes care to evaluate lessons to be learned and—

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Was going to an election a lesson learned?

[Anita Anand, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

This was a time when I was not in the role of minister so, of course.... I had just, as you know so well, been procuring vaccines for the country, but I will turn to my deputy minister—

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

That's okay. Thank you.

I'll ask a question broadly.

Are you aware of anyone in your department, or in the previous minister's office, who delegated authority to any parliamentarians, on behalf of your department or any other government agency, to issue visa facilitation letters?

[Anita Anand, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

No, I am not aware of any such activity. These—

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Would anyone in the minister's office have the authority to delegate that authority to a parliamentarian?

[Anita Anand, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

I do not believe so.

The facilitation letters were only issued by GAC and IRCC, using official government email addresses sent directly to applicants. There's—as you know—an ongoing investigation, but my office and I have no special knowledge of this.

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Thank you.

The last time you appeared on this issue—I think it was several months ago, at the special committee—there were still, by all accounts, several thousand Afghans with bona fide connections who served in our country's efforts in Afghanistan and who had not been evacuated.

I reviewed the federal budget, yesterday. Why wasn't there significant additional funding for the Canadian Armed Forces, particularly given there was clearly a capacity gap in this area?

[Anita Anand, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

The last time I appeared at this committee we did discuss the goal of IRCC and our government to bring at least 40,000 vulnerable Afghans to Canada. We have now made even more progress towards that goal, with 28,000 Afghans who can now call Canada home.

This progress is going well. It's an ambitious target. It is one that we take very seriously, and we'll bring as many Afghans to Canada as quickly and safely as possible. That remains our priority.

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

How many of those persons did we have to rely on other nations or allied nations to evacuate for us?

[Anita Anand, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

The evacuation, as I said, was very tense. It was moving very quickly, and we worked very hard to secure the air bridge and to bring out as many Afghans as possible.

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Thank you.

Again, on the federal budget, given the geopolitical situation, it has a glaring omission in terms of any sort of significant increase in funding to address our capacity gap.

Why weren't you able to secure that funding with your cabinet colleagues for our armed forces? Particularly given the outcome of this report, it's clear that we need more resources. Why isn't that in there?

[Anita Anand, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

I'd like to take you to the fact that we put on the table almost $40 billion for NORAD modernization and continental defence last June, in addition to $8 billion in the budget of 2022, in addition to a 70% increase in defence spending beginning in 2017 under “Strong, Secure, Engaged”, and the fact that we are undertaking—

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

I'm sorry for interrupting—

[Anita Anand, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

—a defence policy update and we will have that—

[The Chair, Liberal, Salma Zahid]

I'm sorry for interrupting. The time is up.

We will now proceed to Mr. El-Khoury.

Mr. El-Khoury, you will have six minutes, and you can please begin.

[Fayçal El-Khoury, Liberal, Laval—Les Îles, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Madam Minister, welcome to our committee. Thank you for all the great work you do in the department.

As you know, the situation in Afghanistan is complex. Why? It's because peacemaking and peacebuilding missions are not possible like they were in Syria after 2014 with the U.N.

Can you tell us more about that and about your department's role in that, in particular?

[Anita Anand, Liberal, Oakville, ON]

Thank you for the question.

Of course, it's very important to do a review of missions and operations. As I said, the situation on the ground in summer 2021 was very challenging. We now have ambitious goals and we've made significant progress toward achieving that. The goal of resettling at least 40,000 Afghan nationals to Canada as quickly and safely as possible remains our priority.

That is the situation for all of our operations. No matter what operation or country we are talking to, the question is always what we can do in that specific situation.

For further comment, I will turn it over to the chief of the defence staff.

[Gen Wayne D. Eyre, Chief of the Defence Staff, Canadian Armed Forces, Department of National Defence]

Thank you very much, Madam Minister.

I will say a few words about peacekeeping missions in the context of Afghanistan.

I must admit that the situation in Afghanistan is too complex for a traditional peacekeeping mission, because we need the approval of all parties to carry out a mission like that. I myself have been deployed a few times to Afghanistan, and I can tell you that it was not possible.

[Fayçal El-Khoury, Liberal, Laval—Les Îles, QC]

If I may, I will ask General Eyre a question to better illustrate the situation.

General, you served as chief of the defence staff in 2021, so you're uniquely positioned to talk about the events leading up to the fall of Kabul, the airlift operation and the experience of Canadian Armed Forces personnel on the ground.

Could you give us a sense of what happened? How did you respond? What were the challenges? What lessons did you learn there as chief of the defence staff?

[Gen Wayne D. Eyre]

On May 9, 2022, I sat before the Special Committee on Afghanistan and testified with some emotion about my pride in our personnel for what they had accomplished during that mission.

I will continue in English, given all the technical terms.

From our perspective, we had not had a sizable—or any—military force on the ground since 2014 when we withdrew from Afghanistan. In fact, I was at ISAF headquarters in Kabul when we lowered the flag.

For a period of seven years, we had no sizable military presence there, and our ability to project force across the globe into a highly contested environment with our air capabilities, with our special operations capabilities and with our global signals capability, and to extract as many Afghans as we did, speaks to the ability, the passion and the proficiency of our members.

Madam Chair, I'm very proud of what our members accomplished in some extremely difficult conditions. We've learned and we've continued to apply the lessons over the last number of years.

[Fayçal El-Khoury, Liberal, Laval—Les Îles, QC]

Madam Minister, this report includes many recommendations to implement special emergency measures within the various departments involved in this crisis. Chief among these recommendations is the establishment of an emergency unit.

What do you think about this sort of thing?