Mr. Chair, one of the things which, to be quite honest, really disappointed me was when the Prime Minister flew down to the United Nations to make a presentation and then took that opportunity to announce that Canada would be participating in assisting the Haitians. I said at the time that certainly I think all Canadians want to help Haiti through this difficult time, and certainly the Conservative Party of Canada is no exception to that.
Having said that, I was absolutely dismayed when he held a press conference in New York and reporters put questions to him, which I thought were valid questions, and he had no idea what he was committing our nation and our young men and women in the armed forces to. He did not know how many troops, where they would come from, whose command they would be under, what the terms of engagement would be, how much it would cost, or where the money would come from. Frankly he did not know anything. He was committing our country to this mission with no understanding of what the mission would be, how it would be accomplished or who would take it on.
I was equally dismayed when I put a question to the Minister of Foreign Affairs at the start of this debate following his presentation. He could not answer whether our troop commitment to Haiti would be funded out of the existing limited resources of the Department of National Defence or whether this would be an extra fund that was approved by cabinet and provided to pay for this mission to Haiti.
It seems to me that the government is taking a very haphazard approach to this, as it often does with foreign affairs and foreign commitments. I wonder if the member has equal concerns about the way in which the Prime Minister seems to follow in the steps of his predecessor, making up foreign policy in front of a television camera.