Mr. Speaker, there are two things I took note of when my colleague from Scarborough was speaking. The first was that he pointed out a fact put forward by my colleague, the defence critic for the NDP, which is that in this country at this time there is a freedom of information chill associated with the Afghan war.
There is a saying that freedom of information is the oxygen democracy breathes. If that is the case, we are having a smog day in Ottawa in everything associated with the Afghan mission, and my colleague was right to point this out. If for no other reason, it is justified to create this committee. Perhaps that committee will be able to pry free the information that is otherwise being denied to people through the ordinary system. My colleague received just today a letter stating that it will be another 300 days to answer a fairly straightforward access to information request submitted months ago. That is one thing I would ask my colleague to comment on.
Second, he stood and started talking about the contracts associated with the Afghan war and a chill ran up and down my spine, because there is always a business case for war. If we look at the Hansard debates during the second world war and the Korean war, we will see that a great deal of time was spent worrying about who was getting these lucrative, juicy contracts associated with profiteering from the war. I was disappointed to hear my colleague start talking about “me too, we want some of those juicy contracts associated with killing--