Mr. Speaker, I am rising today on a question that I originally put to the Minister of National Defence on November 16 last year to talk about the peacekeeping mission and specifically to raise concern over the danger in this mission and the number of heavy weapons that the militants, whether they be ISIS terrorists, Boko Haram, al Shabaab, or even separatist forces that are fighting against the UN peacekeepers in west Africa have access to.
November 16 was just after Remembrance Day. We witnessed the Minister of National Defence use Remembrance Day as a platform to explain that he was going to extend the mission for our UN peacekeeping troops in Canada to be in Mali or be someplace in Africa for up to three years. Remembrance Day is not the time to be making those types of policy announcements. Remembrance Day is the day we commemorate those who have served this country and the many who have fallen in defending our rights and our values and fighting all sorts of atrocities, oppression and tyrants around the world.
The Prime Minister wants us to be back in the peacekeeping theatre because he is trying to get a seat for himself at the UN Security Council.
I have to make sure that everyone is aware that the Mali mission, where it is rumoured Canadian troops are going to be stationed, is the deadliest mission for UN peacekeepers anywhere in the world. Over 100 peacekeepers have already died since 2012 in Mali. That is not counting the number of troops that have been killed that are there as part of the French forces which are not part of the UN peacekeeping mission, or the Germans, who are part of the European mission. In 2016 alone, 26 UN peacekeepers died. The Mali mission represents only 15% of the entire UN peacekeeping troops around the world, yet the Mali mission represents 90% of the death rate. That is unacceptable.
The Minister of National Defence has said that he would be laying out the UN peace operations that Canada was going to be involved in by the end of 2016. Here we are almost two months into 2017 and the Liberals are still waffling and dithering, and delaying this announcement.
The question that I raised back on November 16 was in reference to a report that was put together by the Conflict Armament Research group, which is based out of the United Kingdom and France. It was able to identify a pile of weapons that had previously been in Libya but were now in the hands of ISIS terrorists as well as militants in Mali. We are talking about Russian-manufactured surface-to-air missiles, man-portable air defence systems, MANPADS, Polish assault rifles, Belgian- and French-manufactured mortar rounds, 60 millimetre and 81 millimetre, which do a pile of damage, and ammunition that was found in Burkina Faso and the Ivory Coast. Chinese-type assault rifles that were manufactured only in 2011 were seen all throughout west Africa. This makes it incredibly dangerous for our troops that have to be stationed in the UN mission in Mali.
Again I come back to the government. When is it going to release the details? Is it going to be putting our troops into harm's way under a UN mission with convoluted chains of command and heavily bureaucratic systems that make it impossible to do the actual job of peacekeeping?