Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to have the opportunity to stand in the House today and speak to this very important issue.
I will begin by commending the leadership of our party, the Conservative Party, and the Liberals who were involved in discussions to come to this point where we have reached a consensus on an issue that is incredibly important to our country, very consistent with our history as a country and very important, obviously, to the people of Afghanistan.
I want to talk a little about an opportunity I had in January of this year to visit the War Museum. It was my very first opportunity to visit the museum and I found it to be a real eye-opener. It was quite an experience to be reminded of our history as a nation, of the 115,000 Canadian men and women who have given their lives over time in World War I, World War II and other missions to not only to make Canada a better place and protect Canada, but to make the world a better place, oftentimes standing up for people who otherwise would not be able to stand up for themselves in the circumstances.
One of the things that I saw at the museum was a slide show that focused on the 71 or 72 men and women who had lost their lives at that point in time. It is now 80. The slide show focused on them as individuals with their families outside of the military setting. I was captivated. I had to watch every slide as it went through. I was struck by how many of these people had young families, sometimes two, three or even more kids in these pictures shown in circumstances just like I enjoy with my family on a regular basis.
It hit home for me what these men and women were willing to give up because they believed so strongly in this mission. When we have a chance to talk to the family members of these individuals, it is interesting to hear them articulate how important the mission was and how their family members believed so strongly and would want us to continue and finish the job.
There is no question in my mind that we cannot help but be impacted by those statements. These are real people, just like the people with whom I play hockey or with whom I went to school. They chose to go into a situation where they knew that they would be putting their lives on the line. They paid the ultimate price with their lives and gave up 40 or 50 years of life with their families because they knew that Canada would be a better place for it and that in the long term it was worth it, as hard as it is for us to imagine.
I want to talk a little about the town of Beaumont in my riding, a fast-growing town of almost 10,000 people. Beaumont has not been so unfortunate to lose a member of its community in this mission but what the people of Beaumont did during last summer really touched me. They decided that they needed to reach out so they chose a member of the armed forces, Corporal Francisco Gomez, and they decided to honour him. They put a monument up in front of their town hall. They had the family come out. The community came out in droves to a ceremony honouring this man's memory because they thought that this was so important. They recognize what the men and women of our forces do to make their town a better place within our country. I want to commend them for that. Recognizing these folks is something that we as Canadians need to do more of.
The motion itself is a fairly long motion but I want to focus on a few key points. I want to focus on the first clause, which is something that we are all very familiar with here. It reads:
...the House recognizes the important contribution and sacrifice of the Canadian Forces and Canadian civilian personnel as part of the UN mandated, NATO-led mission deployed in Afghanistan at the request of the democratically elected government of Afghanistan;
The reason I want to focus on that clause is not to remind everybody here because we are all aware of that. The reason I want to focus on that clause is because when I go door-knocking or when I hold a round table and I talk to people, there is much confusion. People do not totally understand the mission. There is a misunderstanding on the part of some that somehow we invaded Afghanistan and we need to work to clear some of that up.
It does not help matters when certain parties in the House, particularly the NDP, as we have heard tonight, repeatedly mischaracterize the mission. The NDP talks of polls that reinforce its stand on the mission but it selectively chooses those polls and it never really focuses on the facts. In fact, I was interested in the previous member comparing casualties, not from 2005 to 2007 or 2006 to 2007 to 2008, but from 2003 to 2008, before we were in Kandahar. It was a totally unfair comparison.
It is interesting when we hear the quote that he selectively chose to talk about when he was talking about an Afghan woman. He did not use the quote, for example, that we heard on March 5 from Fawzia Koofi, a member of parliament who said, “I think the past five years, say five to six years in Afghanistan's history, were golden years for us for many reasons. First of all, the fact that you've seen women sitting in front of you representing their country for the first time in the country's history, you have 68 very intellectual and brave women sitting in the parliament, not only symbolically but meaningfully sitting in the parliament and representing the people”.
That is the story that the NDP never tells. It is also interesting that NDP members never talk about the accomplishments. Strangely, they talk about things getting worse. We have heard over and over tonight the claim that things are getting worse. There was no talk whatsoever about the facts, the fact that more than six million children, a third of them girls, are enrolled in school in 2007-08. It is more than six million compared to 700,000 in 2001. That is a relevant fact.
We never hear them talk about the fact that per capita income has doubled between 2004 and 2007, nor the fact that, when it comes to health care, 83% of Afghans now have access to basic medical care compared to 9% in 2004. When we talk about vaccinations, Canada has directly supported the vaccination of more than seven million children against polio, including approximately 350,000 in Kandahar province alone. I have another fact concerning refugees. More than five million refugees have returned since 2002, including more than 365,000 in 2007. Those are the facts but the NDP never refers to those fact, which complicates the situation from the point of people's understanding.
I would be curious to know if there are NDP members holding round tables in their communities and sharing the facts with them and then allowing them to make their decisions.
I want to refer to another part of the motion which reads:
that Canada should continue a military presence in Kandahar beyond February 2009, to July 2011, in a manner fully consistent with the UN mandate on Afghanistan....
Then it goes on to list the components of the military mission.
The notion that we should continue this mission is shared by several people from my riding and, interestingly, I have several people of Afghan and Pakistani origin in my riding. Not all of them are in favour of the mission. Some are opposed and some are in favour but, interestingly, their position is very similar. One of the reasons most clearly articulated by the people who are opposed is that the people of Afghanistan do not actually believe we will to finish the job. They talk about the history of countries going in and not finishing the job and therefore we should not be there because they do not believe we will finish the job either.
Interestingly, the position of those from those communities who are in favour of the mission is the very same reason. They say that we need to finish the job because in the past no one else has and if we leave we will leave the country in a worse condition than it was when we arrived.
All the NDP talks about are the challenges and it blows them up to be, I believe, more than they are. Admittedly, there are significant challenges, but we are dealing with a country that is the fourth poorest in the world and one that has a newly formed democracy. It is completely unreasonable to expect that this country will be like Canada tomorrow. There are some challenges. One of my constituents used the analogy of it being like a football game and being backed up to the one yard line. He said that the goal was not to throw a touchdown pass because if we were to try we would be in trouble. We need to move the yardsticks, get out to the 11-yard line for a first down again and then move the yardsticks again.