Mr. Chair, I want to thank the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of National Defence for his comments, and I want to remind him that we have to remember first and foremost, I actually advocated for the non-lethal military equipment that we provided to the Ukrainian military. I accompanied some of those equipment deliveries in 2014 and 2015. At that point, we had just signed the second Minsk agreement. That agreement was holding. It was working. We were participating in the co-operation training agreement with the United Kingdom and the United States in training up Ukrainian forces.
However, in the last six months, the Minsk agreements are no longer holding. The violations are rising on a daily basis. Troops are killed and injured every single day. There have been 10,000 Ukrainians who have been killed because of the situation. The military in Ukraine have been trained up by Canadian, British, and American forces to provide them with the equipment to properly defend themselves, such as sniper rifles, anti-tank missiles, anti-ballistic missiles, ways of dealing with mortar attacks, and also blocking radar from Russian sources. Things like proper radio equipment and night vision goggles are needed now. Those things are always needed and are something that we should be supplying without any hesitation. However, the lethal weapons are required for Ukraine to protect their citizens, first and foremost, and to make sure that this war in Donbass does not spread to the rest of Europe.