Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise today to address a question I first raised in the House back on November 2. I asked the defence minister to lay out what Canada's interest was in participating in a UN mission in Africa.
As members know, we have been saying for some time that the only national interest we can figure out is the Prime Minister's own interest in getting a seat at the UN Security Council.
We know this dialogue has been taking place, but only from one side. There were some premature announcements by the minister of sending over 600 troops to Africa, $450 million, and 150 members of the police forces going to help in UN missions in Africa. That could be in Mali, the Congo, Ethiopia, or Uganda. There are a number of different places where UN missions are currently under way in Africa. However, all fingers seem to point to our troops being deployed to Mali.
Mali is an incredibly dangerous mission. It is one that we question whether it serves Canada's national interest. We know many different nations are providing peacekeeping troops to the Mali mission, over 13,000. We also know it is the deadliest mission out of all of the UN missions, accounting for over 90% of UN peacekeeper casualties last year alone.
When ISIS members heard that Canadian peacekeepers could be deployed to Mali, they said that they would love to use the blue helmets for target practice. We also know this is a mission where the UN is spending a great amount of resources on force protection, not on the protection of civilian populations.
The problem is that the minister and the Prime Minister seem to be hell-bent on ploughing ahead on a mission that is not in the national interest of Canada. At the end of the day, it will not provide the type of relief we hope to see for the people of Mali and other nations of Africa.
More and more veterans are concerned that Canada has not learned from its past. The lessons learned in Somalia, Rwanda, and Bosnia never really paid off until the UN mission ended and other forces were brought in to make peace.
The minister wants to talk peace operations. We know that if we are to be successful, there are other way Canada can do this, and there is still a great risk of the spread of ISIS, even though it is currently on the run in Mosul, in Raqqa, and in Iraq.
First, we have an obligation, first and foremost, to our troops to use them appropriately. Second, we have to ensure we put them in a position that when we do call upon them as the Government of Canada, they are there under the right chain of command with the right rules of engagement. That does not happen under the bureaucracy of the United Nations. It happens under other joint operations through NATO, through international security forces that are set up from time to time to deal with things like terrorism and the atrocities that we are witnessing in Mali and other African nations at this time.
I would ask the parliamentary secretary to finally answer the question. How does this serve Canada's national interest?