I have said in a lot of different places, in a lot of publications, and in a lot of fora stretching back over 10 years that as far as I'm concerned there ought to be much greater parliamentary control over troop deployments abroad. I have called for the necessity for Parliament to approve deployments of as small as 200 to 300 troops being sent overseas. I believe this is extremely necessary, not simply because of the forms of parliamentary democracy, but to engage the Canadian people in the debate about whether or not troops should be sent overseas.
Secondly, I've also called for much greater authority on behalf of your committee, and the reason is your committee, in my opinion, deals with something that is entirely different from everything else the government does. What your committee does is deal with questions of the military and national defence. It deals with questions of deploying Canadian troops abroad to kill people, if necessary, at the behest of the state, to serve our national interests.
The people whom we are deploying abroad are also going in harm's way. By signing up to the Canadian military they have taken up, in a sense, an unlimited liability. They will lay their lives on the line for the people and the Government of Canada if necessary. There is no other citizen in this country, including the police, who has a liability that is unlimited. That is why I think your committee needs to have more power and authority than other committees in Parliament and why Parliament should vote on overseas deployments.
I also want to say this, and that is, once the vote has been taken, you have to leave it to the military to do what it needs to do until such time as it is necessary to go back to Parliament at the end of the deployment, because you can't be interfering in everything the military does all of the time.