Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague from St. John's East raises the most important question of all: what is the nature of this mission?
What words are being played with as the government describes an advisory role? These are Canada's top, elite special forces. If they are targeting, and someone else is doing the shooting, is that just advising?
We do not have any details about that. What we had tonight was a diatribe, un ramassis of George W. Bush-era arguments.
This is what we are listening to here tonight. There is nothing that has been put on the table tonight that would allow any reasonable Canadian to vote in favour of the mission being proposed by the Conservatives, because we know, as my colleague correctly points out, that the Americans are already talking about several years. We have been down that path before.
We were down that path when the Liberals, after deciding correctly not to go into Iraq, decided that we should go into Kandahar, unprepared for the situation we were being put into. That is mission creep.
That is the slippery slope that the government is putting us on. That is why we are insisting, not to be informed but to be consulted and to have a right to vote based on full information.
As things now stand, we do not have enough information to do that. That is why the only responsible thing is to say no to the Conservatives.