Madam Speaker, it is hard to keep track of all the non-sequiturs in the hon. member's speech, but let me just deal with a couple of them.
The first one in her original question was that ISIL had declared war on Canada. It really does not matter whether it is ISIS, Daesh, or whatever it wants to call itself, it cannot declare war. It does not much matter what it says about Canada. In order to declare war it would have to have a state. Only states can declare war on each other. As the head of the Canadian Forces has said, we are in state of armed conflict with a non-state actor. In this business, words do matter. That was the first non-sequitur.
The second non-sequitur is that apparently the lives of the people who died in Afghanistan were worthless because we did not give CF air cover in Iraq, I am assuming. How those two are linked I do not really know.
We will recall that we are in a coalition. A coalition by definition is an alliance for combined action. Among the various coalition partners, they piece out the various tasks to be done. In this instance, we had an oversubscription to jets and fighter bombers. Apparently there were something in the order of 200 in theatre, of which Canada had 6. Of the 200, 150 of them were U.S. jets.
Therefore, we made the decision, after no less than 98 members had discussed it in the House of Commons, after an election, and endless amounts of conversation, that we would refocus the mission to one of training, advising, assisting, intelligence, and security stabilization. We have tripled the actual number of people who are in theatre to 830. They are primarily involved in the training and assisting. They are being deployed as we speak. Brigadier-General David Anderson is in Baghdad providing invaluable assistance with the minister of the interior in order to keep not only the coalition partners, but also the Iraqi security forces and various militia at least going in the right direction. We provided something in the order of $1.6 billion in security stabilization in Lebanon and Jordan.
All of these efforts on the part of the government, which is euphemistically called a whole-of-government approach, we hope will be a valuable contribution, will reduce the redundancy of six jets, and therefore focus our efforts on the ability to encourage the Iraqi security forces to actually end this conflict.