Foreign Affairs committee  Absolutely. On top of that, the Chief of the Defence Staff will issue an instruction once the bill gets ratified and gets passed. At that point, we will take that, in a sense operationalize it, and give the direction to the Canadian Armed Forces. This will describe what the bill

Foreign Affairs committee  Because of the legal aspect of this thing, I will defer to my colleagues.

Foreign Affairs committee  But, if I can, as a covering statement on that, the concern is always whether, should there be a coalition, our soldiers might be exposed to criminal prosecution as we turn this bill into law. That's my understanding, but I would defer to my legal colleagues.

Foreign Affairs committee  I could also add on the issue of how we deal with allies and coalitions in joint operations. I made the point of looking up the participation in the NATO-sanctioned mission, ISAF, in Afghanistan. We had 51 different countries that participated in that specific operation, 21 of wh

Foreign Affairs committee  To the best of my knowledge, no, sir.

Foreign Affairs committee  At one point we thought it was a good idea. That's what it came down to, and so stocks were purchased. As a matter of fact, a significant amount of munitions were used, but as folks examined this, they decided not to employ them in any operations. There was also a lack of operat

Foreign Affairs committee  I will take a first stab, and then I'm sure I'll be able to get a legal mind to help me out on that one as well, but the answer is yes. For example, you may have an American aircraft that is transiting over top of Canada to go to a theatre of operation, flying over the North Po

Foreign Affairs committee  If I may respond on that one, first of all, every single decision for us to assume command is usually directed from government to us. It's not something that we undertake on our own. We get a political decision to go ahead, but it's after careful consideration of all the aspects,

Foreign Affairs committee  Okay. I'll use a specific example to answer that. If by chance you are working with allies in a place like Afghanistan and you happen to be out in a forward position being attacked, and the only air assets you have happen to be American air assets equipped with cluster munition

Foreign Affairs committee  First of all, in terms of the actual operational aspect, certainly a Canadian might be in charge, but then it comes down again to the policies enacted from the non-party state for what they're using. When we are giving directions as to what we want to achieve, we are always givin

Foreign Affairs committee  What I can do is indicate how the coalition is working, how we just in recent operations had involvement from other nations as well.

Foreign Affairs committee  That would be exactly it. Whenever we're going off to conduct operations, most of the time they are multinational, coalition-based operations. And of course, with having non-state parties on that thing, they tend to also carry quite a bit of weight, particularly the United States

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you very much. I'll start and then turn it over to Lieutenant-Colonel Penny as well. There would be rare occasions. Whenever we get involved in operations, we tend to indicate right up front any limitations that there may be. This is common practice when you're dealing wi

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you very much. On that aspect of things, as we indicated in the opening statement, the CDS has banned the use of cluster munitions with the directive that was issued in 2008. Since then and before that, we have never used the cluster munitions. One of the things we go to

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you very much, sir. Members of Parliament, I am pleased to be here today with Lieutenant-Colonel Chris Penny from the office of the judge advocate general. Lieutenant-Colonel Penny was a member of the Canadian delegation that negotiated this convention, and he has since as