Mr. Speaker, before I present my prepared remarks about the government motion to send Canadian troops and fighter jets to Iraq for a combat mission, I would like to address some of the comments made by the minister who just spoke.
I will start by reminding my friend that although his answer to my colleague, our critic for defence, was artful, it was not accurate. He said on the air this weekend that there was a United Nations resolution that unanimously allowed for this mission. That is simply false. There is no such resolution. We can read it in its entirety. It is quite long. The preamble is very long. It sets things out. It is simply not true that this is a United Nations mission.
The minister is far too intelligent and far too experienced to know that. He said that on the air, and people will be able to check the record of what he said and compare it to what he just said again here today.
The other thing is that in his remarks earlier, the minister claimed that the government had articulated clearly the reasons for this mission, the end game and what it was supposed to be about. That is not true, and I will point that out citing chapter and verse of the alternating versions we have received from the government.
There was something most shocking in Friday's speech in the House by the Prime Minister, and I am anxious to hear the Prime Minister today. It is always important to hear from his foreign affairs minister, but the Prime Minister, of course, should be front and centre in this debate.
In describing ISIL, the minister said that the reason they were going to go after this group was because they raped, pillaged and slaughtered. No one is underestimating the horrors that we have seen. In this day and age, they come instantaneously either to our TV screen or through other media.
However, if we contrast that with what was in thePrime Minister's speech verbatim Friday, repeated just now by the foreign affairs minister, the foreign affairs minister said that his government was no friend of Assad. I am more than willing to take the foreign affairs minister at his word, but actions speak louder than words. What the Prime Minister did say in his speech on Friday was that if there were a request from Assad to bomb in Syria, he would follow that request. What that means in real simple terms that every Canadian can understand is that the Prime Minister of Canada is according a great deal of credibility to Bashar al-Assad and his murderous, genocidal regime. We give them no such credibility on this side of the House.
How can the government on the one hand claim that the Assad regime is not even worth talking to and then on the other hand say “but when they ask us we're going to respond to their request”? They are mutually exclusive and it shows a total lack of structure in the thinking of the government. It also shows a lack of rigorous thought. It shows a lack, frankly, of ethics on the international stage.
We also heard the minister say a little earlier that one could not deliver humanitarian aid unless one was involved in the combat mission itself, in the bombing.