Joe Comartin

[Afghanistan, March 13th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, just quickly I will tell the member why I am so passionate and feel so strongly about this. It is because of where I come from and where I saw political decisions made during the second world war at Dieppe where we lost 950 of our personnel in that raid. The reason we were there had nothing to do with good military tactics or the skill and the heroism of our people. It had everything to do with that kind of a political decision, and that is mostly what is going on here.

We are in Afghanistan because the Americans want us in Afghanistan. We are fighting in Afghanistan because our allies will not. That is the lesson we should be learning from Afghanistan.

[Afghanistan, March 13th, 2008]

It is a conundrum, Mr. Speaker. The more appropriate question would be, is it going to make any difference if we stay? Will it make any difference if we stay there? That is the question. Has it up to this point? The answer is obviously no, it has not.

Every independent analysis of what is going on in Afghanistan is that the situation is deteriorating. We could go through every single independent analysis. There is not one that says it is getting better. Are we going to see those same people who are asking for us to provide that security?

Let me go on a different tangent. Both the U.K. and the Americans have to be heavily criticized for their very direct refusal to engage in negotiations, to force negotiations. When some have been attempted, they have been very limited, very weak in their support, but that is the route we have to go.

We have said very clearly, it is right there in the wording of our motion, that we take our troops out safely. That will take some time. We recognize that.

It is very clear that if we continue the combat mission, it will not do anything to provide additional security. It will simply escalate the fighting. It will escalate the number of deaths.

[Afghanistan, March 13th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, the world has changed since Alexander the Great. I do not think the Conservative government has seen that. It believes still that the traditional combat role is the methodology to deal with this insurgency.

I will move forward a bit in history and mention the second world war. When our troops went into Italy, they actually had some pretty poor leadership and they had been given very little resources. They were not fighting the Italian population, but the German forces. The Canadian Forces were able to develop techniques at the captain and major rank on down. They dealt with the situation, which was a unique one at the time in terms of the way the Germans were defending. We were able to do that. We dealt with a new set of circumstances. We did not do what we are doing in Afghanistan, which is using the same kind of combat military approach that does not work when we are dealing with that kind of insurgency.

With regard to the hon. member's question about occupation, the key here is how do the people in the Kandahar region see us? They see us as occupiers.

[Afghanistan, March 13th, 2008]

We can hear the Conservative side saying that is ridiculous, and they are ridiculing me. But it is the truth. That is the reality today. It has been seven years, with the greatest military power in the history of the world, the greatest military alliance in the history of the world, and the situation from a military standpoint, from a security standpoint, is worse today than it was seven years ago.

There is a lot of naiveté. We hear mostly from the Conservatives in this debate, and we heard it again from the last speaker in response to a question, that our allies love us being there. Absolutely they love us being there because it is our soldiers who are dying, not theirs. They are dying at a much higher rate than American soldiers.

We went into this mission with our eyes closed. Our NATO allies did not. New Zealand, Australia, France, Germany, and I could go down the list of 20-odd countries in NATO, all refused to take on this combat mission. They knew what the consequences would be. To be blunt, and perhaps rude and undiplomatic, they were quite happy to let Canada go into Afghanistan. They encouraged us.

I can remember having debates with some of our allies' ambassadors. They said that Canada should stay there; Canada should ramp up; Canada should do more. When I asked them if they were going to do that, if they were going to lift the caveats, if they were going to send their soldiers into the real combat zones, often there would be no answer because of embarrassment, or they would indicate that was not their government's policy.

I want to go down a list of just how naive we were. I accuse some of our military leadership in this regard as well. It is not just our political leadership.

When we sent our soldiers into Afghanistan they were not wearing the right uniforms. They did not have the proper communications equipment. I do not want to say anything bad about our people on the ground because they have done an absolutely amazing job given the circumstances that we, as political leaders, put them in. We did not give them the communications equipment they required and at times they could not even communicate with our allies in the field. The LAVs that we initially gave them were clearly insufficient for the circumstances.

We, the military leadership and the political leadership, had not done any analysis of what we would be faced with there. We ramped up and moved in our tanks, and if this motion passes, we will be moving in helicopters, and frankly, the next thing will be fighter jets. I do not know what will be moved in after that. Will we move in more soldiers? We saw how successful that was with the Russians. Estimates indicate that if it is soldiers that are needed, we may need as many as 400,000 soldiers. Canada has roughly 50,000 to 60,000 in total at best, at any given time, and hardly any of them are engaged in the combat mission.

Where is the leadership? Is the government prepared to continue? We have lost 80 soldiers. How many more have to die? Can anybody in this House seriously and honestly in good conscience and good faith say that by 2011 it will be any different? In that period of time, how many more soldiers are we going to lose? I do not believe that anybody can honestly stand in this House and say that, and those who do are deceiving themselves.

Over the past seven years the situation has deteriorated. It has become worse and there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that in the next three years it will get any better.

We hear that we are doing things better for the people of Afghanistan. It is not true. It can be put as simply as that. It is not true. There are food shortages. There is an increase in the drug trade. There has been no significant improvement in the quality of life for the vast majority of people in that country.

There is a central government that arguably controls Kabul, maybe. The suicide bombings have increased there in the last few months. The number of deaths has increased in Kabul in the last few months. At best the central government is controlling no more than 10% of the country, and that is the government Canada is supporting. In the rest of the country, especially in the south, there is no control of anyone, including ourselves. In the east there is hardly any control. The north is controlled by factions, militias and warlords who continue to perpetuate the situation that was there before we went in.

Later today we have to vote on this motion. I have seen absolutely no evidence that would make me conclude that the decision should be an affirmative one on this motion. The NDP has set out the terms of a safe withdrawal of our troops with our continued involvement in Afghanistan. We are not going away. There is Canada's involvement both at the diplomatic level and in the aid area to assist at this point. This is where our strengths are. We believe in assisting in getting some peaceful resolution.

Naiveté is what is always thrown at the NDP. The reality is that we look at what has occurred. There has been a large number of deaths--and I am not speaking of Canadian deaths at this point, although those are tragic enough--I am talking about the thousands and thousands of deaths in Afghanistan as a result of the chaos. Will that continue to some degree? We know that some of it will.

It is my firm belief that if the resolution that is contained in the amendment proposed by the NDP is followed, the consequences will be less severe. There is no question that there will be consequences. The consequences that will flow from our continued involvement in the combat mission and our continued involvement in a course of conduct that leads us nowhere other than to greater chaos will be more deaths and greater destruction in Afghanistan. Therefore, it seems to me that the path set out by the NDP is clear and one which I would urge all members of this House to follow.

[Afghanistan, March 13th, 2008]

It may in fact be higher, and all of our personnel are geared toward the combat role.

I want to say just as an aside that one of the troubling things, and one of the things that makes me angry, is that we hear from the Conservatives in particular that we have something to prove as a country. Again, have we learned nothing from our history?

We proved that at Vimy. We proved that in Italy in the second world war. We proved it on the beaches of Normandy in the second world war. We can go down the list. Canada and our military personnel have nothing to prove to the world and it is an insult to the reputation of our military personnel to hear those kinds of comments, to hear that we have something to prove. We do not.

I do not know what it is about Canadian people, but when it is necessary, we step up. I have never quite understood that and I have studied it a lot, but that in fact is the reality. But that is not the factual situation we are dealing with in Afghanistan.

Other than, arguably, the Boer War back in the late 1800s, Canada has never been involved in an imperialist action, in occupying another country. We might ask, what about the first world war, when we were in Europe? What about the second world war? The significant difference between those and even the Korean war is that the areas we were in during those wars were areas where the people who lived in those areas wanted us to be there. We were in fact liberators. We were not occupiers.

It is quite obvious from the resistance and the insurgents that we are battling in Kandahar and in the south of Afghanistan that this it is not the case in Afghanistan.

Let me go back to the naïveté. We hear members on both sides of the House who are in support of this motion saying that we have to stay there, that “we have to stay there because”, and then they go through all of the tragic realities of Afghanistan. What it says to me, again, is that they should listen to themselves, that they should listen to what they are saying and then go back and look at what was being said in those few months before the Americans pulled out of Vietnam, in those few months before the Russians were forced to pull out of Afghanistan.

They should look at the quotes, whether they were from our military leaders, political people at the time or people on the ground. Always what we heard was, “We are just about there, we are just about to win it, and we just need to escalate a little bit more, so give us this”. Of course we know that did not happen in those cases.

If we move beyond those more well-known conflicts, there were any number of other times, and I particularly urge people to look at the number of insurgencies that were fought from the second world war on. The same thing happened in almost every single one of them. There is a lot of documentation on this. This is not something I am making up. It is not just my own observations and opinion.

In the vast majority of insurgencies being combated, that combat has been unsuccessful, in way over 75% of them. We are approaching 90% that have been unsuccessfully combated by using conventional military methodology, the same methodology that this motion would compel us to follow for the next three years. It failed in almost 90% of the cases.

We might ask, what about the 10%? Is this one of those where we are going to be successful? The reality is that when one looks at all of the objective evidence, it in fact is getting worse in Afghanistan.

The greatest military force in the history of the world, in the form of the United States, and the greatest military alliance in the history of the world, in the form of NATO, have been fighting in Afghanistan for seven years now, longer than the second world war and much longer than the first world war. The situation is worse today than it was when the initial invasion of Afghanistan occurred seven years ago.

[Afghanistan, March 13th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, it is difficult to rise in the chamber and speak on this motion from the perspective that we in the NDP bring without feeling a significant degree of anger, quite frankly, over the position Canada finds itself in at the present time, and with a great deal of frustration.

What it comes down to, in my opinion, is the incredible naïveté that I am seeing from both the government side and the official opposition side in support of the motion before us today. One wants to cry out, “Have we learned nothing from history?”

Have we forgotten the lessons? Let me be very specific. Have we forgotten the lessons of Vietnam? Have we forgotten the lessons of the Soviet experience in Afghanistan? Or we could go back historically to the British experience in Afghanistan, or all the way back to Alexander the Great's experience in Afghanistan, literally thousands of years ago.

When we see this motion and we see the support coming from both the government side and the official opposition side, the answer obviously has to be no, we have not learned anything, because we seem to be bound and determined to repeat the same mistakes.

We know, and there is no dispute on this, that we went into this combat mission with our eyes firmly closed or our heads looking in the wrong direction. There is no other explanation. That was under a former administration, not the current one, although with the support of the official opposition at that time.

We, the country and this legislature, were told at that time that this was really following Canada's traditional role, a role, quite frankly, that Canada more than any other country in the world developed, starting back in Suez in the 1950s and for any number of times since then, a role of using our military personnel and our other resources as a nation to promote peace. That in fact has turned out to be a lie.

That is not what we started doing in Afghanistan and it is certainly not what we continued to do in 2003 and in 2005 as we ramped up our involvement. That involvement, we have to be very clear, has been grossly weighted to a military combat role. It is undisputed by everybody in this House that nine out of every ten dollars we are spending in Afghanistan are being spent on the military side--

[Criminal Code, March 13th, 2008]

moved for leave to introduce Bill C-528, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (judicial discretion).

Mr. Speaker, this is a relatively simple and straightforward bill. It would have the effect of reintroducing judicial discretion into the Criminal Code no matter what other clauses there may be in the code with regard to mandatory minimums.

The clause, no creativity here on my part, is very similar to the clause that is in the system in England. It has worked extremely well for those in England where the legislature determines what mandatory minimums should be, but in those extreme, unusual, human conditions where there needs to be some flexibility, it allows that to the judiciary.

(Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed)

[Business of Supply, March 12th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I will give the member for Mount Royal this scenario.

I would ask him to take the Smith case, with the same set of facts and points that have been proven or admitted to in the courts in Montana, but to add this one fact, that before Mr. Smith was apprehended he was able to escape from Montana and find his way back across the Canadian border. It is the same set of facts and allegations with regard to the murders.

Could he describe to me what would have happened at that point under existing Canadian law and, in particular, under the decision by the Supreme Court of Canada with regard to the extradition in those circumstances?

[Canada-U.S. Relations, March 11th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, the former Conservative minister, Michael Wilson, now the government's Ambassador to the U.S., was aware of the NAFTA leak that interfered in the American democratic process before the story broke.

Mr. Wilson is now hiding behind a so-called private conversation to deny any wrong. That is not good enough.

An internal probe by the Prime Minister's staff will not get to the bottom of this scandal. When will the RCMP be called in to investigate the actions of Ian Brodie, Michael Wilson, and all the other actors in the NAFTA leak?

[Justice, March 11th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, the number of leaks that go unpunished is on the rise and the Conservatives cannot be trusted to fix the problem. The Conservatives' NAFTA leak and the Liberals' income trust leak are two recent examples.

Breach of trust provisions in the Criminal Code cannot be applied to most leaks and the Security of Information Act was struck down in 2006. Internal investigations and disciplinary measures just will not wash.

When will the Conservatives introduce measures to close the gaps in the law and get tough on leaks?