Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my hon. colleague who, like me, sits on the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development.
I just want to tell the hon. member one thing. Requesting that members of the Manley panel appear before the committee is a decision of the whole committee, and not just a decision of the Liberal Party of Canada.
After reading the panel's suggestions, they are very close to those of the Liberal Party. There would have been no use at that time just to ask them questions. Today we are very close to having an association between the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party on this issue because we know we are going. We have principles. They talk about rotation. They about the role of CIDA within Afghanistan. Right now, CIDA is totally absent. In Kandahar, the region where our forces are, CIDA will tell us that it has 355 members over there, but 335 of them are from the armed forces, which leaves 20, and of those 20, there are some members of the RCMP. That is why we are not doing anything in that region.
We could ask the minister or someone from CIDA to answer the question and tell us how many there are, but they tell us nothing. For me, there is no problem. The problem right now is what will we be focusing on with our mission in Afghanistan. This is what we are doing for the moment.
We want to be sure that the government will follow this motion in the sense that we will not stay after 2011. I think Canada is doing its share. Canada is not a military power in the world, but we are working to try to re-establish the development over there. We should do some development in the Kandahar region.