Mr. Speaker, to the first component of the speech of my colleague opposite, I fundamentally disagree with the government's approach to the combat mission for the reason that the government has never adequately thanked the Royal Canadian Air Force for its contribution of more than 200 air strikes, which successfully assisted in containing the spread of ISIL with no civilian casualties. Instead, what we heard from the Liberal leader was a flippant genitalia joke, frankly, about the CF-18s in his early days as leader. The party opposite has not explained to the House of Commons why we should remove the CF-18s from that mission. It has not talked about it. The government has an ideological aversion to taking a stand on an issue.
Many of the pundits in the Canadian media have written some basically satirical pieces about the Prime Minister's waffling on this issue. There is no reason why the CF-18s cannot continue their excellent work there. This is because the Liberals are trying to walk some sort of line, and I am not quite sure what it is. The end result is that they have cheesed off everyone in Canada and done nothing, rather than advance the cause of this mission, and they know it.
When members of the Royal Canadian Air Force come home, they are going to be faced with questions in their communities on why the government pulled them out after they were doing such good work. I would love the member for Fredericton to tell just one of them why the Liberals decided to end the mission, why they were taken out of the field after they did all the work. The member would have a hard time doing that.
With regard to the Syrian refugee component, my colleague rose with such enthusiasm saying that we are going to support this and that it is great. We should certainly be helping with the Syrian refugee crisis, but the bottom line is that the government does not have a long-term plan to deal with the refugees. I find my colleague's comments to be full of cotton candy and rainbows but completely lacking substance with respect to how the government is going to provide language services, or how it is going to provide affordable housing, or how it is going to do that in the context of processing, using resources for spousal sponsorship applications, let me say. The government is redirecting those applications to sponsoring these applications.
The government has not thought about a whole-of-government approach to this. It has not planned it through. I am going to be watching with great interest over the next 10 to 18 months to see how this lack of a plan materially impacts the lives of not only Syrian refugees coming to Canada but Canadians as a whole.