Mr. Speaker, I welcome the opportunity to ask a couple of questions of the member for Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, who has spent 15 minutes outlining a multi-point plan on how Canada should change its focus in Afghanistan, away from what his party got us into in the first place in the aggressive search and kill counter-insurgency mission in Kandahar.
Next, unbelievably, his party gave the Conservative government enough votes to ram through an extension on a mission with nine months still to go, adding two more years to that mission. Those members did this without a proper evaluation of what was happening with the mission, without an opportunity for us to even begin to consult Canadians, let alone have a fully informed, thorough, responsible debate before being pushed into a vote on very short notice.
Mr. Speaker, I assume that you will be as liberal in the interpretation of the rules of relevancy as your predecessor in the chair this afternoon. We are here this afternoon to deal with Bill C-37, An Act to amend the law governing financial institutions and to provide for related and consequential matters, but since the member for Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca was given the opportunity to speak for 15 uninterrupted minutes about his views on Afghanistan, I assume it is in order for me to ask him a question on this extremely important topic.
It took me a minute to realize that we were debating Afghanistan, so I did not hear in full the first couple of points in his five point plan on how to get us out of the Kandahar quagmire and finally address the horror of what is happening to our troops in the current flawed mission.
I want to ask him about a subject that came up in the foreign affairs committee yesterday of which he will be aware, I am sure. The Deputy Commissioner of the RCMP confirmed and informed the committee that 34,700 Iraqi police had been trained by Canadian RCMP officers over the last couple of years. This raised in the minds of everyone at committee, I think, the question of how many Afghan police, particularly in Kandahar, had been trained over the same period, because of course we are not supposed to be in Iraq although it is a very important thing for there to be training for the Iraqi police.
Given the fact that our commitment is supposed to be dealing with the insecurity in Kandahar, and given that many people feel that problems with the under-policing, the under-qualified policing and the insufficient numbers of police are at least as much or perhaps more of a threat to the security of the citizens of Kandahar, the question of interest, of course, is how many have been trained by Canada in Kandahar? I have to say that I almost fell off my chair when the Deputy Commissioner of the RCMP confirmed there had been 150.
I want to invite the member to address this question. Where does the issue of training the Afghani police fit into the member's five point plan for getting out of the Kandahar quagmire?