Mr. Speaker, after becoming the minister of defence in 2016, the minister decided to quash an inquiry into the Canadian transfers of detainees to local custody in Afghanistan where they were routinely facing torture. An inquiry would have revealed why these transfers were not stopped and why these war crimes were never reported. In making this decision, the minister was in an apparent conflict of interest as he served as an intelligence officer in Afghanistan at the time of the transfers and would have had knowledge of the torture of detainees.
If he was, in fact, the architect that he claimed to be, would the minister not have known about the tortures of the Afghan detainees that the Canadian forces handed over to the Afghan authorities at that time?