Mr. Speaker, I was not on the list initially tonight, but I am really pleased to have the opportunity to add to this debate.
There is obviously unanimity in the House about the need to recognize and celebrate the spirit of our troops, army, navy and air force, who served in Afghanistan. I have to say I was a little disappointed at the last speaker's remarks. It took away from the dignity of this motion.
I do, as we all do, recognize the duty to honour, the duty to remember, the obligation that we have. It is important that people of good faith on all sides remember that obligation and work together, despite the challenges. Of course there are challenges, but we need to work together to overcome those.
I want to talk about the mission in Afghanistan and the people who prosecuted that mission on our behalf and on behalf of the people of Afghanistan. Being from Edmonton, I realize there is a huge connection between that mission and my city and the people of Edmonton.
Earlier today in a Standing Order 31 statement, I spoke about the reception the troops received when they came back to Edmonton, which is like nowhere else in Canada. No matter the time of day or night, no matter the weather, a group of people was there giving out Tim Hortons coffee, doughnuts, and so on. The Edmonton Police Service was there. The RCMP was there. With their sirens blaring and lights flashing, they provided an escort through the centre of the city of Edmonton to the garrison on the north side of the city. I was in that convoy a number of times. It was extremely moving. I know the soldiers appreciated it very much.
On one particular day, I knew the air crew flying the Airbus which had been escorted into Edmonton by two CF-18s in a colourful display of support. The captain of the Airbus asked air traffic control for clearance to fly across the city at low altitude with the F-18s in tow. For those who know Edmonton's 97 Street, it is kind of the main north-south drag, and about 1,000 or 1,500 feet above, there was a Canadian Forces Airbus with an F-18 on each wing, very visible and very loud. The phone calls started to come in. As soon as people found out what it was, they asked if they could come back again. That is the kind of spirit Edmonton and I know the rest of the country has for those men and women.
There are other organizations in Edmonton, a couple of which have been alluded to by other colleagues. We have something in Edmonton called Project Heroes which commemorates with portraits the 158 soldiers we lost, as was done elsewhere. We have an organization called No Stone Left Alone. It is not just about Afghan vets, but about vets writ large. Their objective is to put a poppy on every veteran's headstone in Canada, eventually, around Remembrance Week. I think they are up to about 15,000 in Edmonton alone, and it is growing.
When we talk about the mission in Afghanistan, the question will ultimately be, was it worth it? Everybody can answer that in their own way. I can say that I was very familiar with the mission from a variety of angles. One was defending the reputation of our soldiers over there when they were being accused of being war criminals by some people in this House. I will not bother going into the politics of that, but it was absolutely shameful. I was extremely proud to be on the front lines of defending those men and women and the honour that they displayed.
I saw them in action. On seven occasions I spent time with our troops in Afghanistan. That will be the highlight of my time as a member of Parliament, the time I spent in Afghanistan. Waking up Christmas morning, which I did five times, at a forward operating base somewhere in the Panjwai district with those kinds of people is something I will certainly never forget.
We talk about progress. One little vignette that I mention often occurred on Christmas Eve 2006. I was standing in a place called Masum Ghar, looking out over the countryside. It was dark and rainy. I had a cup of coffee and a cigar with the chief of the defence staff, Rick Hillier, and somebody else. We were standing there looking over the countryside. It was bleak. There were bombs going off in the distance. It was pretty grim. That was my first visit. I knew that it was real and that what was happening there was regrettably real.
One year to the minute later, Christmas Eve 2007 at Masum Ghar, I was with the new chief of the defence staff and the minister of national defence, now the Minister of Justice, the member for Central Nova, having a cup of coffee and a cigar, looking out over the exact same piece of territory. It looked like a scene from the Canadian Prairies. The lights were on in all the villages. It was quiet and peaceful. Just that one little thing said to me that what those men and women did was incredibly worthwhile.
I visited a number of times after that and saw the progress they had made with schools and interacting with the children. They were interacting with the Afghan institutions, government institutions like the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police, which they did a tremendous job of training.
I had the pleasure of spending time there with people like Rick Mercer and Mary Walsh, and on my last trip there, Don Cherry, who was understandably a pretty big hit with the troops. I spent time with Ron Joyce, who was the co-founder of Tim Hortons. He threw open the Tim Hortons—I think it was 2006 or 2007—for two days and wrote a personal cheque at the end of those two days for everything that was given away.
Our troops were leaders in Afghanistan. We were the go-to folks. We were smallish in numbers, compared to the Americans and the British, but we provided the leadership. Our training, the quality of our people, and the quality of our equipment was second to none. At the end of the Afghanistan conflict, and I think it is still true today, Canada has the best small army in the world. When I say army I mean army, navy, and air force. It is because of the kind of people we have that we are commemorating with this monument.
I have another little story about the spirit of our men and women in uniform who went back, some of them four times. They fought to go back, which I am sure drove their families crazy. It was because they knew they were making a difference. On one of the Edmonton rotations, there were eight or nine soldiers going back for the fourth time. The commander, the brigadier general, called each of them in to have a little heart-to-heart, just to make sure their heads were on straight, since they were going back there for the fourth time. He asked one master corporal what his biggest fear was about going back to Afghanistan for the fourth time. The master corporal looked him in the eye and said, “It is that you won't let me go, sir”, whereupon the brigadier general said, “Carry on; you are fine”.
I was at the airport many times seeing people off or welcoming people back, and I was seeing this particular group of soldiers off. There were about 150 of them. I was standing, chatting with four or five of them. I recounted the story of the brigadier general and the master corporal. They kind of laughed, and one guy piped up and said, “That was me”. I shook his hand and said “Good on you; the people of Afghanistan are going to be much better off because of people like you”.
The people of Canada are obviously much better off because of people like him, whether they are Princess Patricias, RCRs, Van Doos, engineers, or Lord Strathconas, with the Leopards, and there were a lot of air force and navy personnel there. I had a lot of friends there with whom I had served in one of my previous lives. I saw some of them there in Afghanistan. I have had the rare privilege of seeing that. Not many people have. I am tremendously honoured, privileged, and grateful for that opportunity to spend time there with those people.
Therefore, I understand the importance of doing everything we can to recognize their service and sacrifice. There were 158 who made the ultimate sacrifice, plus five civilians. I have had the sad honour of attending many ramp ceremonies and things of that nature and going back to Kandahar year after year and watching that memorial grow, tragically, as it inevitably would.
It is incredibly important that we do everything we can to celebrate, not war, but the spirit of the kind of people who will stand up time after time and lay it on the line for someone halfway around the world whom they have never met and will never see again. They know they have made a difference. In making a difference, in this case, for the people of Afghanistan, they have made a huge difference for the people of Canada, and there is nothing I would not do personally—and I am sure everyone in the House feels pretty much the same way—to help celebrate that spirit and what those people have meant to us.
This is obviously going to be unanimously approved by the House and that is absolutely the way it should be. I can think of no better thing to do at this moment.