Mr. Speaker, after months of misleading Canadians, the defence minister wants us to believe that he only recently learned how wrong his statements were on the role of the Red Cross in Afghanistan, even though he and the foreign affairs minister received a personal briefing last September.
Now, access documents show that if he had bothered to read his own ministerial briefing books, he would have known since October that the Red Cross only has the right to visit detainees and is not responsible to monitor them.
How can the minister expect Canadians to believe his so-called distortion was not deliberate when his answer was at his fingertips for months?