Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and thank you, Minister, Deputy, and CDS, for your attendance today.
I'm subbing for the regular NDP member from New Westminster--Coquitlam. So let me just take an opportunity to say, no matter how much we may disagree on different aspects of the mission and details of what we ask our forces to do, as someone from Hamilton, with a lot of soldiers serving us, how proud we all are of the work they're doing in carrying out the mandate of Parliament, and our duty is to flesh out what that mandate should be.
My question is around the item on page 207, and it's the “Mounted Soldier Survivability: Non-lethal Laser Dazzler”, to the tune of $10.5 million. My understanding is that this is a relatively new technology, and it's meant to afford soldiers an opportunity to temporarily blind anyone in front of them, for whatever reason they may feel necessary. We all want our soldiers to have the best possible equipment so they can be protected, but this is Canada. And as we're seeing with tasers, that's not where we begin and end our concerns. We've also got to consider the public and others.
So much like the tasers, this new technology looks like a very big buy. Could you give us a sense of how much each of these costs and what this will mean exactly?
But the focus of my question is around the issue of health. We are part of a treaty signed in 1998 that said we wouldn't use any laser weapons that could cause permanent blindness. Therefore, what we of course need to do is make sure we're doing adequate testing to ensure that is not happening inadvertently, much like a concern that now exists for tasers. So I'd be curious to know what steps have been taken, what medical steps have been taken, what kind of technological assurances there are, given that we signed an agreement that's part of the Geneva Convention that would guarantee we do such testing to ensure that we meet the requirements of the treaty we signed in 1998.
So my focus is on exactly how many, and how would they be deployed? My main focus is on how much testing has been done. What kind of assurance could you provide, including tabling documents if necessary, that shows that the proper testing has been done, that we've met our international obligations, and that we're not going to inadvertently be doing something these aren't intended to do, which is to cause permanent blinding.
And if I could put one other question in there, I would also like to know whether or not these would ever find their way into domestic crowd control situations.