Mr. Speaker, I would like to quote back to the previous speaker his question, am I my brother's keeper, and his injunction that indeed we should be and we should respond positively.
Certainly all Canadians feel that way. The difficulty the Reform Party has with this in very specific terms is that we have seen this Liberal government, that wants to bring this motion and send our troops, gut the armed forces to the tune of $7 billion and take away their ability to do things.
We have people in our armed forces who are absolutely second to none. We have heroes and heroines in our armed forces who are there to serve our country and to serve humanity, as the previous speaker said. The problem is that it is undefined whether this is a peacekeeping or peacemaking mission, it is undefined whether this is going to be strictly under a NATO mandate or a UN mandate. This seems to be chewing gum and baling wire where the government is working it as it goes.
The government cut $7 billion from the Canadian armed forces. The Reform Party has had a consistent position that whatever we ask our armed forces to do, we must be prepared to give them the proper resources, training, manpower, equipment, counselling, back-up support, health care, whatever is required.
If we are not prepared to resource the armed forces adequately, we should not be asking them to be doing things they are not capable of doing.
I would like to know what the position of the NDP is relative to the funding of the armed forces because I labour under the impression, particularly as a result of some of the comments and pronouncements that have been made by the member for Burnaby—Douglas, a very outspoken NDP member, that the idea would be to cut back and to cut back on the armed forces budget.
We cannot have it both ways. We cannot ask our heroes and heroines in our armed forces to go into these conflicts without proper backup training, support, medication, counselling and equipment.
What is the position of the NDP? If we are going to be doing this kind of activity, would the NDP see putting money, not just the $400 million band-aid the government is talking about in this budget, but the proper resources back into the armed forces so that our people will have the ability to do the job that we are asking them to do?