National Defence committee  It's worth mentioning that Canada pays, I think, almost 2% in terms of assessed contributions to peacekeeping operations. Not only should we be putting boots on the ground, but we have an interest in protecting our investment in peacekeeping operations.

National Defence committee  I think you just need to keep plugging away and educating people and talking about the spectrum. While we're talking about the spectrum, I use that word picture deliberately. Conflict prevention is $1 and at the other end of the scale it's $100. These are orders of magnitude, mo

National Defence committee  First of all, any force, whether it's peacekeeping, peace support, or counter-insurgency, whatever you want to call it, has to create the conditions where the belligerents are deterred and the civilian population is reassured. To do that, you need numbers, and you need quality de

National Defence committee  So, if I can just pile on, I've been to Gao, and it looks a lot like the Sinai. It's a desert location. I haven't been to this specific airfield, but I imagine that it's a wide open space. The general mentioned C-RAM, counter rocket, artillery, and mortar radar. That's important.

National Defence committee  Well, drones, of course, and they do have them. But somebody has to go out there and engage these guys if they decide to turn up and lob stuff your way. In terms of state sponsors, one of the mortar bombs that hit my camp in Egypt didn't explode, so we could see that the tail fin

National Defence committee  I have no idea. I don't know what the Germans have.

National Defence committee  Yes, I can't imagine that we would deploy a force without making sure that contingency is looked after.

National Defence committee  You didn't mishear me. I'll just say very quickly that in the MFO, they don't have processed food like every other military mission I've been on. I enjoyed fresh veg and fruit from Israel and Egypt., and I much appreciated it.

National Defence committee  I think you just need to look to defence policy: defence at home, defence of the continent, and defence of Canada's interests abroad. Peacekeeping, if we're going to use that word—peacekeeping or peace operations—falls into that third realm: defence of Canada's interests abroad.

National Defence committee  I'm no UN expert, but I will just quickly add that MFO civilian headquarters in Rome has 12 professionals in it. I knew them all by their first names. If I needed something, I just picked up the phone and called them. That's in stark contrast to what these two gentlemen had to de

National Defence committee  Again, I recall that immediately after the French intervened and before the conflict, there was talk of splitting the north into six different zones with PRTs—provincial reconstruction teams—and mimicking the structure we had in Afghanistan. It needs a counter-insurgency. It woul

National Defence committee  Very briefly, I think the big change has been a shift from a lot of chapter VI missions to chapter VII missions, and the inclusion in those mandates of such things as protection of civilians. When you give a UN force a “protection of civilians” mandate, you're taxing them quite c

National Defence committee  As I think you know, my wife was the ambassador in Mali from 2005 to 2008—Madame Isabelle Roy. I know Mali very well. I've been there probably more than half a dozen times. I actually went from Timbuktu to Gao on the river. It took me three days. It was a lot of fun, but you can'

National Defence committee  The terrain is entirely different. The population density is entirely different. The whole physical geography is completely different, so the military problem set is different as well. Plus, this was organized slaughter in Rwanda. You were talking about multiple insurgent group

National Defence committee  Nonsense. What I would say is exactly what General Mitchell said, that peacekeeping—if you want to use the word—has transitioned from what it used to be to counter-insurgency, basically. Unless you put sufficient resources on the ground, you cannot stabilize the situation. You mi