Thank you, Mr. Minister and General Hillier, for being with us today. Clearly, this is a very important issue, and we all support our troops and the purpose of the mission.
I have two or three questions. Hopefully, we can get through them in 10 minutes.
Mr. Minister, in May the government clearly wanted to have a debate and a vote in Parliament on the extension of our mission in Afghanistan, but once the government committed to taking that step, you would agree that the government had an obligation to provide Canadians and parliamentarians with the kind of information you may have been working with in deciding to extend that mission for two years, or at least placing that motion before the Commons.
One assumes the Government of Canada had access to intelligence from DND, from Foreign Affairs, from NATO, and from allies about the situation in Afghanistan at that time, information about such things as the strength of the Taliban resurgence; the cross-border flow of the Taliban from Pakistan to Afghanistan; the sanctuaries in Pakistan; the issues of government corruption in Afghanistan, and how that was inhibiting the reconstruction and the development work and the training of the forces; the lack of commitment from other NATO allies in terms of troop strength and, in fact, substantial national caveats; lack of reconstruction taking place at that time; and of course, the severity of the poppy crop and the attendant problems therewith.
The government, if I can recall, Mr. Minister, said absolutely nothing about any of these issues during the debate in terms of the intelligence the government had with respect to these issues.
The government's propensity for withholding information continues. Your department has refused this committee's request for biweekly briefings. We have been told by your bureaucrats, under your stewardship, to essentially get lost as a committee of parliamentarians, and I don't believe that's acceptable. It is, in fact, reprehensible.
Let me get back to the issue. By rushing to extend this mission with a brief debate and a vote, without sharing the basic information with Canadians about what the government knew or ought to have known, do you not believe the government actually perpetrated a fraud on Canadians?