Dawn Black

[Business of Supply, May 17th, 2007]

Mr. Chair, I will move on to procurement.

When the Standing Committee on National Defence first got involved in its study on procurement, the first question that I asked on February 6 was who the lead minister was and who had the final responsibility on defence procurement. The minister answered that there was no final responsibility on defence procurement. That is on the record.

Is the minister still of that view and who in cabinet would be responsible if there were a major crisis or a real problem with defence procurement?

[Business of Supply, May 17th, 2007]

Mr. Chair, section 5 is a very important provision in the agreement. It requires that the Afghan government notify us if it wishes to transfer a detainee to a third country. I am sure most people think that a third country would be the U.S., but given that there are Uzbek militants involved in the border areas, they could be taken as detainees as well and possibly transferred to Uzbekistan.

Would National Defence be involved in granting a request or would it be another department?

[Business of Supply, May 17th, 2007]

Mr. Chair, I understand that, but I want to ask a few more questions on it. If the minister is unable to answer them, that is fair enough.

The new arrangement gives full access to the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, the Canadian government and the UN human rights organizations. I would like to know who the government is considering to send in as monitors. Will they be fully trained as human rights monitors as there is specific training around that and, therefore, will they be able to spot signs of mistreatment?

Also, has the government used that right of access to date and how often is it planned that monitoring would take place?

[Business of Supply, May 17th, 2007]

Mr. Chair, I understand that the minister was not given graphic incidents of actual torture that may have taken place. I do understand that.

The fact is, though, that the government's own Department of Foreign Affairs produced reports year after year of the potential of abuse and the knowledge that abuse and torture did take place in Afghan prisons.

The new agreement is much better than the previous one. In terms of the enforcement of the agreement, I would ask the minister to take time to tell us how that agreement is being implemented. I am particularly interested in section 7 where the agreement talks about detainees being held in a limited number of facilities by the Afghans. Can the minister give us an idea of how that section of the agreement would be implemented and monitored?

[Business of Supply, May 17th, 2007]

Mr. Chair, in terms of the department's handling of the detainee issue in Afghanistan, I really have to say that it was the first question that I asked the minister in the House of Commons the very first day that this Parliament sat. I requested at that time, over a year ago, that the agreement be redrafted.

I said it was a deeply flawed agreement that was agreed to under the previous government. It did not have any provisions for follow-up by Canada. It had no veto on onward transfer of prisoners and it did not have the same strong provisions that other NATO countries had in their agreements.

I asked the minister about that in committee as well. I asked the CDS about it in committee, and I asked department officials about that agreement over the course of that year in committee.

The minister's response at that time was that there was no intention of redrafting the agreement. The CDS and the officials of the department really kind of brushed off my concerns.

Why did it take so long for the minister to acknowledge the deeply flawed agreement and the problems within that agreement? Why did the government have to wait until human rights activists took it to court before it acknowledged the depth of the problems and then did redraft it?

[Business of Supply, May 17th, 2007]

Mr. Chair, this House and the Canadian people have been promised a defence capabilities plan for a long time now, for at least six months, if not probably longer than that.

How far long is that plan? Is the government using that plan as it produces it to inform its own procurement costs?

[Business of Supply, May 17th, 2007]

Mr. Chair, can the minister give us the DND full cost of the mission then? This is the number that his department does track. Can he tell the House what that sum is?

[Business of Supply, May 17th, 2007]

Mr. Chair, I take it the government is not including in those costs the costs of any equipment?

[Business of Supply, May 17th, 2007]

Mr. Chair, I would like to thank the minister for being here tonight to discuss the estimates. The official opposition gets to pick which two ministers do this and I guess he has been twice lucky with the Liberals. I have a number of questions for the minister and I hope that he finds them fair.

I am going to ask a basic question about the spending plans of the government with respect to Afghanistan, as a follow up to the last time the minister was in committee of the whole in November.

The minister stated then that the incremental costs for the mission in Afghanistan to date was $2.1 billion. He estimated that there will be a further $1.8 billion expended. He estimated that the cumulative incremental costs to February 2009 and also bringing the Canadian Forces home would cost $3.9 billion.

In light of some of the purchases that have taken place, the tank purchases and other procurement decisions that the government has made recently, I want to ask the minister to tell us what the total incremental costs of the mission will be, and further to that, what exactly has driven up the total estimated costs to date?

[Afghanistan, May 17th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, just like it censored and denied access to the human rights reports that were put out by foreign affairs showing that the government was fully aware of the possibility of torture and killings in Afghan prisons, the Department of Foreign Affairs has completely blanked out the report from the corrections officers. It is totally blank. Nothing is in it.

What is the government hiding? What was in the report? Why is it censoring every report that comes out from Afghanistan?