The first principle--with which I'm sure all the members here, along with the members of the government and the House of Commons and the Senate, and most Canadians, will agree--in consideration of any of these kinds of things, in any deployment, is the safety of the members of the Canadian armed forces.
That's not to say that they're going to go in someplace and hide out and stay inside the wire, so to speak. They just won't do that.
But we don't want, ever again, to deploy forces as we did into the former Yugoslavia, where they'll be subject to harm, danger; notify their superiors about that; and be left there on their own. So that's the first consideration.
As to rules for going on missions, if you read through all the white papers since 1947, and period statements on defence, and so on, you'll see in all of those papers a set of conditions that must be met before the Canadian Forces can be deployed on peacekeeping operations. We never used them. We have never followed those; or maybe a little bit here, a little bit there. All of these decisions are taken in the circumstances.
Finally, as for civil-military command and so on.... These are loaded words; “command” for sure is. Certainly senior military officers have to cooperate with civilian authority. So the civilian authority that directs Canadian operations overseas is the Prime Minister, and the cabinet, and the government, and, more largely, the Parliament of Canada.
But before we go down that road too far, you have to understand--and I'm not assuming that people don't understand, Mr. Chair—that command arrangements in Canada are directed by the law. There's the National Defence Act, and orders and statements to the Canadian Forces must be passed through the CDS and so on. So you would have to adjust the law and you'd have to do these other things.
What I teach at school when we talk about public administration and defence administration and so is that there's a thing called “administrator's delusion.” The administrator's delusion is the assumption that if you get the process right, the outcomes will be right. So we spend all our time talking about the process, hoping to find the magic way to make decisions and to run operations so that these things come out well.
Well, it is a delusion. You have to have people, including politicians and public servants and military officers, who can adjust sensibly to the conditions they find themselves in when we deploy people overseas.