Evidence of meeting #108 for National Defence in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was training.

A recording is available from Parliament.

On the agenda

MPs speaking

Also speaking

Roméo Dallaire  Founder, Roméo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative, As an Individual
Shelly Whitman  Executive Director, Roméo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative, As an Individual
Julie Dzerowicz  Davenport, Lib.
Richard Martel  Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, CPC

11:55 a.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Stephen Fuhr

We'll go to five-minute questions now, MP Spengemann.

11:55 a.m.

Liberal

Sven Spengemann Liberal Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON

General Dallaire and Dr. Whitman, thank you for being here. Thank you for your service to our country and to the world at large.

I'm going to go out on a bit of a limb and I'm wondering if you'd follow me with a hypothetical.

Let's say it's a Facebook video. Picture a city under chapter VII post-conflict. Let's say it's mostly Iraq at any time in the last decade. You have a female convoy commander who is prepared to move outside of the wire of a forward operating base. Let's say she has a couple of civilian vehicles embedded in her convoy and that there are UN officials who are moving out to meet a local minister to sign an MOU. They go out into the city and a couple of turns later she faces a group of what are clearly young people aiming AK-47s and RPGs at the convoy.

If we pause the video here, I'm wondering if you could unpack that scenario from a human, moral perspective. For women in peace and security, clearly PTSD is involved, but also how messy a scenario is peacekeeping going to remain as we go forward? How quickly are we going to resolve these moral questions?

Noon

Founder, Roméo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative, As an Individual

Roméo Dallaire

You've hit exactly the stuff that we are doing at the tactical level to give the skill sets to the forces and all that Shelly explained. That is, in fact, one of our scenarios.

Noon

Executive Director, Roméo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative, As an Individual

Dr. Shelly Whitman

I just want to clarify. When General Dallaire says "we", he means the Roméo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative. We have a set of scenarios we walk through, 12 interactions, one of them specifically being a checkpoint scenario, for example, much like the case you are highlighting. That's what we build up. What do you do in that particular context?

We have interaction charts we walk through. We give the options out. There are a host of things that you didn't put in your scenario that we would put in for information, but for example, even knowing that's a possibility and finding ways to de-escalate the situation are examples we would put out there.

We would also have a clear understanding of what the rules of engagement were. There's a critical area here that many forget. When it comes to children, you have to understand how a child thinks, and that is much different than preparation for an adult in that situation, understanding that element, recognizing that there may be different postures to take, different types of language you would use or smiling. Soldiers aren't used to being told to do that.

There are basic elements of that nature that are a key part to all of the kinds of elements of the training that we conduct. We're not saying that every scenario is going to work out perfectly, but we can give a lot better options than we're currently employing and, if that's the case, then we can find ways to reduce the PTSD as well as the negative outcome for both the children and the soldiers who are in those situations.

Noon

Liberal

Sven Spengemann Liberal Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON

How do we answer the moral question of even engaging in chapter VII ground presence troop contribution actions where it's clear that child soldiers are in theatre and are actually operating?

Noon

Executive Director, Roméo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative, As an Individual

Dr. Shelly Whitman

Let me give you an example. We've worked with former child soldiers to create the training that we've conducted. I always recall some of the children in one of the workshops telling me, “Please tell the soldiers not to back down from the situation, because in the heat of battle was when I got to escape.”

I'm saying that because there are many people who don't understand that there might be a time when we're going to have to make a hard decision. There might be a time when we have to use a weapon to protect ourselves, and unfortunately, the casualty of that one child may lead to a hundred others being saved.

Those realities are part of the training that we have to understand. Backing down and not engaging in these situations, not entering peacekeeping is not creating more prevention. It's actually telling those who are using children, “Keep doing it. It's working.”

Noon

Liberal

Sven Spengemann Liberal Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON

Thank you for that.

I have 45 seconds. I'm going to open a question that hopefully we'll have a chance to circle back to.

General Dallaire, how concerned are you about the Uighur Muslim community in China that is currently reported to be oppressed by the Chinese government at various levels?

Noon

Founder, Roméo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative, As an Individual

Roméo Dallaire

It's interesting, because my concern has been the Baha'is in Iran and how they as a group are being oppressed and even facing genocidal actions.

I have to stay to some of the ones that I'm at ease with, such as Myanmar, where a genocide is in motion and we are watching it happen 25 years after the other one. This inability to engage where human beings are being massively abused in order to hold a country accountable, and to take action in that country when we have the responsibility to protect doctrine out there is inexcusable to the world.

12:05 p.m.

Liberal

Sven Spengemann Liberal Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON

Thank you very much.

12:05 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Stephen Fuhr

MP Gallant.

12:05 p.m.

Conservative

Cheryl Gallant Conservative Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and through you to our witnesses.

First of all, Mr. Dallaire, we support the work of our troops, what they're doing in Mali, using our helicopters to fly emergency medical evacuation missions and whatever other troops may be in the region to help out in one way or another. However, we've had several witnesses for this study state that the UN Mali mission does not stand a chance of viable long-term peace.

As someone who has considerable first-hand knowledge of UN peacekeeping, do you agree with the assessment that this so-called peacekeeping mission is all for naught?

12:05 p.m.

Founder, Roméo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative, As an Individual

Roméo Dallaire

How many fights have continued since the catastrophic failure of Mali to kill civilians by the villageful? How many slaughters have been continuing to go on? What's the scale of destruction of the human beings? How many more refugees and internally displaced are being moved around because of this scenario?

My argument to this, Madam, is that anybody who looks at a mission, even with a flawed mandate, and doesn't see the possibility of amending the mandate, of working on a peace process....

We're working on the peace process in South Sudan right now, which has some significant problems on a significant scale. You cannot look short term at peace support or conflict resolution. The short term will often give you some bad feelings and some risk that you would prefer not to have, but it is the sustainment of an effort, the commitment by the international community, and in particular, by northern countries.

We abdicated on peacekeeping with the end of the Cold War and left developing countries with no capability, no equipment, to take on all this peacekeeping. We walked away from it. We even walked away from our rapid-reaction capability that we presented in 1995 as a solution. We walked away from SHIRBRIG, which we even commanded. We let them do it, and now we're saying they're not doing it right, it's weak, and so on.

What I would argue is that it is high time we return in a variety of very capable scenarios, not by deploying massive numbers of troops but by providing far more aware, intellectually based capabilities, with soldiers who are credible, with diplomats who can work with soldiers and with humanitarians.

I was on a committee and I had General Petraeus tell me that in Afghanistan he never talked to an NGO, because they didn't want to talk to him. There were 7,000 NGOs out there. Imagine all the information he could have gotten. That type of stuff has to stop and we have to bring in new capabilities. Generals who will sit here and tell you that the only solution to these things is to fight are generals of another era.

12:05 p.m.

Conservative

Cheryl Gallant Conservative Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON

Just to clarify, you said that chapter VI is peaceful conflict resolution whereas chapter VII involves combat action or kinetic wars.

12:05 p.m.

Founder, Roméo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative, As an Individual

Roméo Dallaire

Potentially.

12:05 p.m.

Conservative

Cheryl Gallant Conservative Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON

If what you're saying is that Mali is chapter VII, really what we're saying is that it is a combat mission as opposed to traditional peacekeeping. We've heard this before.

If this was a combat mission from the outset, why would the government label this as peacekeeping, when there's no peace to keep, other than to sell it to the Canadian public under a false bill of goods?

12:05 p.m.

Founder, Roméo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative, As an Individual

Roméo Dallaire

As I told you earlier on, “peacekeeping” is a term of another era. You might get away with “peace support operations” as such, but we're into conflict resolution that does call for security forces to potentially have to be engaged in extremis to be able to use force to stabilize a situation and protect a certain capability that you know will be a force multiplier, ultimately, to achieve the mission, as the helicopters are, as an example.

When we look at combat, we're not there to win wars. We're there to help stabilize and protect civilians. That's the aim of the exercise. Peacekeeping, if you want to use that term, is today about how you protect civilians in order to permit the human security envelope, which has all the other dimensions—humanitarian, legal, nation-building, and so on—and then the room to be able to pull it together. How do you get the diplomats and the military to come back with solutions that will change the nature of the conflict as it adjusts over time?

12:10 p.m.

Conservative

Cheryl Gallant Conservative Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON

Okay.

You were not commanding the mission in Somalia, but you were in the military at that time. You obviously would have been observing, at some level, that mission. Would that be correct?

12:10 p.m.

Founder, Roméo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative, As an Individual

Roméo Dallaire

I was commanding a brigade then, yes.

12:10 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Stephen Fuhr

I have to hold it there, unfortunately.

MP Fisher.

September 27th, 2018 / 12:10 p.m.

Liberal

Darren Fisher Liberal Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you so much, General, for saying that we are there to help protect civilians and stabilize. Thank you for that. I appreciate that comment. I believe Canada is the only, if not.... I'm not sure where Britain is with the adoption of a doctrine for handling and reacting to child soldiers. They may have signed on by now. I'm not sure. If not, it's close. As well, thank you so much for your work, which was instrumental to the development and the implementation of the joint doctrine note in 2017.

I read a statistic that one in 10 Canadian veterans of the Afghanistan conflict has been diagnosed with PTSD. We know that it might be even more than that, because some are still serving and have not been diagnosed. We know that in Afghanistan and Iraq, our troops encountered numerous child soldiers.

To both of you, do you believe that with this doctrine and the subsequent training, and we've talked a lot about prevention versus reaction today in various topics and on various questions, our Canadian troops will be better prepared mentally to handle the potential engagements and encounters with child soldiers?

12:10 p.m.

Founder, Roméo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative, As an Individual

Roméo Dallaire

When I was in Rwanda, I saw child soldiers on all sides, but I didn't see them. I just saw them as combatants, and if I saw them as combatants, then I would have acted accordingly. Realizing that these were kids being used as combatants, finally, changed the whole nature of what I should be doing. The impact of that, and seeing that, and taking action against children has had a catastrophic effect on me and many of those who served with me. We realized that we had not faced this thing before. These were not just a couple of kids on the sidelines. These were the main, sustaining forces that were doing the main work. How do you handle that?

That's why I've been at it since 2004, and Dr. Whitman has been with me since 2008, building our institute as a world capability of in fact reducing the impact on our soldiers of facing child soldiers by giving them tools, new tactics and new ways to be able to handle them without having to go kinetic.

I'll let Dr. Whitman continue.

12:10 p.m.

Executive Director, Roméo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative, As an Individual

Dr. Shelly Whitman

I think it's incredibly important to make sure that this is where we have to go—beyond the policy, beyond the doctrine, into action. I'm a little concerned right now that we're still at a point where it hasn't gone deep enough yet. In terms of the Canadian Armed Forces or the RCMP or other police officers who get deployed, we need to make sure that the practical, scenario-based training has occurred. It has to be ingrained as part of the training. I know we're working toward that, but we haven't had that happen yet. That has to happen.

The other point I want to make clear is that we have to have a lessons learned approach to this too. We have to make sure there's a feedback loop so that once we send out the troops with this training, they come back and then we can ask those kinds of questions.

About seven years ago, I asked the Canadian Armed Forces psychologist who was leading aspects on PTSD for the troops how many troops had faced this issue in the field. He told me there were none. I asked how he knew there were none. Had he asked the question? He replied they didn't ask the question. I asked why not, and he said they had enough questions to answer already when they come back. I said that one more question wasn't going to kill the questionnaire.

My point is that we also have to ask the question to understand how prevalent it is, and then put into action matters that can address it and be ready to follow that up and adjust the training and the lessons learned in the approach and have new therapies and things that we have to be ready to commit to changing as well.

12:15 p.m.

Founder, Roméo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative, As an Individual

Roméo Dallaire

Very rapidly, when we were doing training in Sierra Leone, preparing a battalion to go into Somalia at the time, I believe, the British were part of the whole training program. The Sierra Leoneans wanted our package to be included in that, which was about three days and scenario-based in the exercises, and so on.

The Brits, from the corporal up to the colonel, wanted to sit in to see how we were training on child soldiers. After the first morning, they asked where in the hell we were when they were in Afghanistan. Did they do things right? How did we do things? They knew they were constantly in these moral and ethical dilemmas. They brought that back and that is what eats away at them, unless they're trained and have the tactics beforehand.

12:15 p.m.

Liberal

Darren Fisher Liberal Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS

Do I have more time?

12:15 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Stephen Fuhr

You have no more time.

MP Martel.