Madam Chair, I will be splitting my time with the member for Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles.
Time is short in this take-note debate and we have heard the appropriate exchanges of compliments back and forth between members of all parties in the House who know through either service or experience exactly what is at stake in Ukraine, but I will cut to the chase.
We in the opposition have long been worried that the Liberal government's commitment to the defence of Ukraine was half-hearted and fading. That would apply to not all Liberal MPs, as I have just said, but to the actions and attitudes of the government as a whole.
Our concerns were realized two weeks ago, when the government, after ignoring appeals from Ukraine since last summer, finally announced an eleventh-hour bare-bones extension of Operation Unifier. This extension does not speak to the brutal new realities, the recent deadly surge in the Russian-backed war on Ukraine. The extension does not respond to Ukraine's request for an expansion of the Operation Unifier training mission. The extension does not answer the outgunned Ukrainians' appeal for defensive weapons and the restoration of satellite battlefield imagery. The extension does not address the long-overdue signing and implementation of the Canada-Ukraine defence co-operation agreement. The extension did not mention Ukraine's request for additional support for the widely recommended expansion of the OSCE monitor teams to report on violations of the Minsk agreement.
The Liberals have not spoken a word of increased humanitarian assistance to the thousands of newly displaced eastern Ukrainian civilians driven from their homes by the recent Russian-directed surge, adding to the more than a million and a half internally displaced men, women, and children and the three-year death toll of 10,000.
Canada's commitment to the defence of Ukraine might not rate high on the Liberals' list of public opinion poll-driven priorities, but the Liberals, and in fact all Canadians, need to remember why Russia illegally invaded and still occupies the Ukrainian autonomous Republic of Crimea, why Russia invaded and still supports the euphemistically described rebellion in eastern Ukraine, and why the toll of death, displacement, and destruction continues there. It all comes down to democratic choice.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the people of Ukraine, along with the populations of many of the former oppressed Soviet republics, chose democracy and chose the west. The western democracies stepped up after Russia's bellicose response to Ukraine's revolution of dignity, the Russian invasion and occupation of Crimea, and Russia's invasion and arming of rebel separatists in eastern Ukraine. Western governments, including Canada's, imposed a range of sanctions on Russia, and in December 2014, Canada committed with the United States and other countries to provide coordinated training assistance through Joint Task Force Ukraine, with the Canadian element known as Operation Unifier.
As we have heard tonight, since deployment in the summer of 2015, the joint task force has trained more than 3,200 Ukrainian soldiers through more than 90 courses.
The Liberals claim their commitment remains strong, but these words often ring hollow. For example, just last December, we saw amazingly blatant duplicity when, on the same day that the Liberals sported traditional Ukrainian embroidered shirts, vyshyvankas, to brag in debate about Liberal support for Ukraine in the form of the free trade agreement negotiated by both our Conservative and Liberal governments, these same Liberals had the temerity to vote against Ukraine in a whipped vote against recognition of the historical deadly Surgunlik—the Soviet Tatar genocide—and Russia's current abuse and deportation of ethnic Tatars from the illegally occupied Ukrainian autonomous Republic of Crimea.
That is why we in the official opposition are so disappointed in what I referred to earlier as the Liberals' eleventh-hour bare-bones extension of Operation Unifier. It falls short of our Conservative government's original commitment to Ukraine. It falls short of what Ukraine has requested and in fact appealed for. It falls short of Canada standing up strongly for a democratic Ukraine.