Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise on the adjournment proceedings to follow up on a question that I asked in the House on June 6 of this year, submitted in the usual way.
The notice stated that I was not satisfied with the answer received, in this case, by the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the Minister of National Defence, concerning my question about the government being forthcoming, first, on its plans to continue the mission in Afghanistan and the fact that throughout 2009 and most of 2010 up until November, the Prime Minister had repeatedly told Canadians that our forces would leave Afghanistan at the end of July 2011 in accordance with the motion of the House.
This was repeated again and again over the course of time. In fact, I remember one time the Prime Minister saying that maybe there would be a couple of soldiers guarding the embassy in Kabul, the embassy where the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of National Defence once resided.
This was the notion and the comfort Canadians had from the Prime Minister that this would happen.
We know what happened in the fall of 2010. Without even a vote in the House, there was a unilateral decision by the government to continue the mission in Afghanistan. It was stated that it was a non-combat mission that would all happen behind the wire. In fact, on November 16, the Prime Minister said in the House, in answer to questions, that the answer was yes to all those questions, as the Minister of National Defence, the Minister of Foreign Affairs and others had said, that the government was looking at a non-combat mission. It would be a training mission that will occur in classrooms behind the wire on bases.
By suggesting this was a non-combat mission, the Prime Minister said that there did not have to be a vote in Parliament.
We had a vote just now about the continuation of a mission, and that was part of the promises that the government gave to Canadians when they ran for election and part of the commitments that were made that whenever a Canadian Forces mission was in operation there would be a vote in Parliament. For the most part, the government has respected that.
However, it is about whether Canadians are being given the whole truth. We have another example of it now. After hearing about this behind-the-wire story, which was told to the Canadian public by the Minister of National Defence and by the Prime Minister, we learned the other day in the defence committee that we had a dozen places in Kabul where training was going on, involving transportation all over the place. We are not behind the wire. In fact, Canadian Forces were engaged in combat when the attack took place on the U.S. embassy.
There are Canadian forces there. They are exposed to significant risks. We were told this was supposed to be behind the wire in classrooms. In fact, Canadian forces, up to a maximum of 950, for three years are going to be engaged in this combat training mission in Afghanistan, exposed to risks.
Canadians are not being told the whole truth. That is the point of my question. I was not satisfied with the answer I received because we were not given the full facts.