Jason Kenney

[Military Contribution Against ISIL, March 30th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, at the end of her speech, the hon. member suggested that the government has blurred the line between humanitarian aid and military action. That is not at all true. What I said was that we have a humanitarian and thus a moral obligation to stop genocide, sexual slavery, the murder of homosexuals and genocide against ethnic and religious minorities.

Without military action, without concrete efforts to stop Daesh's campaign of violence and genocide, there will be more victims and a humanitarian disaster. That means that the two cannot be completely separated. The humanitarian crisis is caused by the violent, terrorist, paramilitary action of Daesh.

Does the NDP not understand, does the member not understand that we must take action to stop Daesh's campaign of genocide? Does she not agree that if we do not there will be more victims of Daesh in the Middle East?

[Military Contribution Against ISIL, March 30th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the hon. member. I know that she has a keen interest in the safety of the people in the Middle East, but I need to correct what she said.

She said that Shia militias were involved in the counteroffensive in Tikrit, Iraq, but I have good news in that regard. Three or four days ago, Iranian-led Shia militias withdrew from the battle in Tikrit. In addition, the United States said that it refused to continue bombings against Daesh near Tikrit unless these militias pulled back.

Obviously, the current situation in the Middle East is complex. There is a conflict between the Shia and the Sunnis. It is also important to note that the Shia, including Iran, and all of the Sunni Arab nations, including Iraq, are all opposed to Daesh. That is the only thing they can agree on in the face of this serious threat.

Like me, the hon. member knows people from the Assyrian, Chaldean, Kurdish and perhaps even the Yazidi communities. Last week, we met with the leaders of these communities, and they all called for Canada's involvement in the allied military campaign against Daesh because they want to put an end to genocide perpetrated by Daesh.

Does my colleague not agree with the members of the Canadian-Iraqi community?

[Military Contribution Against ISIL, March 30th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, that member continues his shambolic, embarrassing, fatuous flip-flopping on this matter of essential international security. This is the member who characterized the policy of the Government of Canada, in responding positively to a request from the Government of Iraq to coordinate with dozens of other nations in a military action against a genocidal terrorist organization, as the Prime Minister wanting to “whip out [his] CF-18s and show [us] how big they are”.

This comes from a leader who is so profoundly unserious on such matters of national security, who ridiculed the equipment of the Royal Canadian Air Force as a bunch of “aging warplanes”. We ought not to be surprised. It is the same leader who said that the country in the world that he most admires is the “basic dictatorship” of China, and who joked about innocent civilians being shot in Kiev because of a hockey game. That is the seriousness of this member for Papineau.

He talks about refugees. He does not acknowledge that the largest refugee resettlement program to this country since the boat people was the 20,000-plus Iraqi refugees resettled by this government. That is a community that I know well. The Assyrians, the Kurds, and all of them, say to us to please continue with the military action.

Why does the member not understand that we cannot stop further humanitarian victims of ISIL's genocide without military action?

[Military Contribution Against ISIL, March 30th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, NDP members display a profound lack of logic on this issue when they say that crimes against humanity are being perpetrated in the region, yet we must respond with humanitarian aid. Without a strong military response to stop crimes against humanity, there will continue to be more victims. The NDP's strategy is to let ISIL take over and kill more people, then send in humanitarian aid at the end. That makes no sense at all.

We are taking strong military action and providing humanitarian aid. We are the fifth-largest donor providing aid to displaced people in Iraq. We have contributed over $67 million to date.

[Military Contribution Against ISIL, March 30th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, first, we are not debating a bill. I need to correct the member in this respect. It is a motion.

If the government were interested in “shutting down voices”, as the member contends, the government would not have brought forward this motion in the first place. I will repeat yet again that there is no constitutional, statutory or conventional obligation on the government to invite a debate of this nature.

The member says “shutting down debate”. In fact, we are having well over 15 hours of debate and dozens of speeches over two days, in addition to dozens of speeches over many hours of debate in October on effectively the same mission. All of this is done out of discretion by the government, precisely to include many different voices in the debate.

With respect to the Assad regime, of course this government condemns it, and is actively supporting international diplomatic efforts to seek a truce between the warring factions of the Syrian civil war. We hope, and we would certainly provide assistance in terms of humanitarian and capacity building, to develop a democratic Syrian government that is representative and protective of all of the factions and communities in that country. However, we should not allow the savagery of Bashar al-Assad to give ISIL a de facto safe haven in the east of that country.

[Military Contribution Against ISIL, March 30th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, it is clear to anyone with eyes to see that the two terror attacks that occurred on our soil last October were inspired by the cult of violence, the cult of jihad, of Daesh, of the so-called Islamic State.

With respect to the responsibility to protect, I think in virtually every intervention and speech I have given on this matter since the invasion of Iraq by ISIL last fall, I have invoked the concept of the responsibility to protect.

Obviously we are not invoking the actual legal formulation of RTP at the United Nations because it requires the support of the United Nations Security Council. Insofar as Vladimir Putin and the People's Republic of China are required to support this, we do not believe that Canada's foreign policy should be circumscribed by the policies of those countries.

The essence of responsibility to protect is this. When such crimes against humanity as genocide are being committed against helpless civilians by their government, or their government is either unwilling or unable to protect them, there is a moral responsibility. We ought not feel narrowly limited by the legalisms of Westphalian sovereignty. It is regrettable, in fact bizarre, to see the NDP take that position now. If we were not acting in concert with our allies against ISIL, there would be tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of additional victims: women and girls subject to sexual slavery, gay men being executed, religious minorities being slaughtered. Thank God, we began to act last October to at least prevent many more of those crimes from being committed.

[Military Contribution Against ISIL, March 30th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, it is a very good question, in part because Canada is proud to have received over 20,000 Iraqi refugees in the past few years, in what has been the largest refugee resettlement program to this country since that of the Vietnamese boat people in 1979 and 1980.

Because I was the Minister of Immigration who launched this Iraqi refugee program, I have come to know the Iraqi Canadian community quite intimately. I can tell the member that in my consultations with the breadth of that community, the Assyrian Canadians, Chaldean Canadians, Canadians of Kurdish origin, Yazidi Canadians, Mandaean Canadians, Canadian Iraqi, Shia and Sunni, with all of whom I have consulted and all of their organizations who have spoken on this, 100% have indicated their support for the Canadian participation in the allied military operation against the genocidal terrorist organization which is seeking to wipe their people off the face of the earth.

There used to be a time when the left in this country believed in concepts such as the responsibility to protect, that responsible and proportionate action was sometimes necessary to prevent genocide. It is regrettable to see that the blinkered ideology of the NDP no longer accepts that notion.

However, fortunately, according to the recent Ipsos Reid poll, 56% of supporters of the New Democratic Party still believe in the concept of the responsibility to protect and in action to prevent genocide. The vast majority of Canadians and New Democrats agree with the overwhelming majority of Canadians of Iraqi origin.

[Military Contribution Against ISIL, March 30th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, on the contrary, we are going to spend not one, but two days discussing it. Add to that the two days spent in October, and we will spend four days on it. By comparison, the British Parliament, a minority parliament, debated a similar motion for only seven hours.

Yes, ours is a parliamentary democracy. However, according to our Constitution, the government is not required to consult Parliament about this. It is a royal prerogative, a discretionary decision under our Constitution. Every hour of debate and every speech is extraordinary and made possible by our government and our desire to include all voices, even dissenting voices.

The sovereign government of Iraq wrote to the UN asking that other countries help defend its citizens against the terrorist and genocidal attacks of the Daesh. Accordingly, we are providing a military response to this request, together with 24 other countries. Under Article 51 of the UN charter, this is the alliance's concept of collective self-defence.

[Military Contribution Against ISIL, March 30th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, I am listening. I was here in the House on Thursday as well, debating this motion for 13 or 14 hours. Today, I plan to be here as long as possible, likely all day, in order to listen, answer questions and clarify the government's policy.

This is not a bill. This is a discretionary motion that the government is under no obligation to move. However, we developed a new approach whereby we consult the members of the House, because we believe that is important when it comes to major deployments of the Canadian Forces overseas.

The hon. member says that the government is not taking the opinion of some Canadians seriously, but it is the NDP that is opposing the majority opinion of its own supporters. According to the polls, the majority of those who voted for the NDP support a continuation of our fight against this genocidal organization that is trying to rid the world of cultural, ethnic and sexual minorities. These are crimes against humanity. It is sad that the NDP believes that Canada should do nothing to deal with this threat.

[Military Contribution Against ISIL, March 30th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the member for Edmonton Centre for his service in the Royal Canadian Air Force. He speaks on these matters with source credibility.

His comments are absolutely accurate. We already had a very extensive debate in this place, with dozens of speakers, last October. This is another discretionary motion for a discretionary debate that the government has given the House an opportunity to have, which is essentially over the same mission. He is quite right.

In fact, we are not adding any additional assets or personnel to the mission. We continue to deploy 69 special operations forces for an advise and assist mission in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, and some 600 RCAF personnel situated out of Kuwait who are manning 6 CF-18, 2 Auroras and 1 Polaris aircraft.

It is the same character of the mission. We will simply be hitting ISIL targets in what it regards as its state, which is in an area of Syria where it has de facto sovereignty. We are doing so in full compliance with international law.

This is just an extra opportunity for debate in this place, as we do want to hear the opinions of members. I do not think my friends in the New Democratic Party really believe there should be unlimited canned speeches on what is essentially a relatively minor change to the terms that were discussed here last October.