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Context: House Hansard - 173 - Mar/27/23

Mar/27/23 4:57:45 p.m.
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Re: Bill C-41

Madam Speaker, I want to thank the member for Lac‑Saint‑Jean for all that he does to help the people of Afghanistan. He spoke a lot about how long it took the Liberal government to introduce this bill. I would like to give him more time to share his feelings and frustrations and I would like for him to talk about the consequences that he, other members and I have faced when dealing with the Liberal government in trying to help the Afghan people. Unfortunately, some Afghan citizens were killed because of these delays.

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Context: House Hansard - 160 - Feb/14/23

Mar/27/23 4:35:36 p.m.
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Re: Bill C-41

Madam Speaker, as my hon. colleague knows, I have been a bit torn on this bill due to my own past history and involvement in Afghanistan and due to my hatred of the Taliban. I care deeply about the Afghan women and girls and Afghans in general. I do believe we need to support this bill, but we do need to get it right. Tied to this, though, in the Special Committee on Afghanistan, recommendation 2 talked about the importance of interdepartmental coordination. This is a good example of a bill that is coming from public safety to change the Criminal Code, but it would tie in to foreign aid, international aid and policies within foreign policy. I would like the member to comment on the complexities of this. It would be nice to know how the government is actually going to lead this effort to make sure that, however it gets put through, it is done right.

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Context: House Hansard - 160 - Feb/14/23

Feb/14/23 6:41:29 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the parliamentary secretary did not address my questions. My first question was, when can we expect the Afghans still stuck in Afghanistan to get here? There were lots of excuses and lots of reasons why there are challenges. Again, I talked to the people on the ground directly involved with moving these Afghans. It is the bureaucracy. It is the lack of paperwork. We can move people within days if we just get the bureaucracy and paperwork resolved. I will go back to the other question I asked. I am looking for an update on when this House of Commons can expect a progress report on the 37 recommendations made by the Special Committee on Afghanistan to the government.

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Context: House Hansard - 152 - Feb/2/23

Feb/14/23 6:33:28 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am here tonight to re-address a question that I asked last week in the House on Afghans and Afghan interpreters, those Afghans who helped Canada during our mission there, and what the current Liberal government is doing to help them out. In particular, I was asking on behalf of Abdullah, who has actually been here, about what they were doing to help his family, who were approved eight months or so ago to come to Canada, yet nothing has happened. His brother is now feared missing and presumed dead. My question to the government then was as follows: How many more Afghans such as Abdullah's brother need to die before the government will take urgent action? I want to emphasize why this is so important. I spent over a year of my life in Afghanistan. I have seen, first-hand, the horrific actions of the Taliban. I apologize, in advance, to anybody listening about some of the graphic details I am going to share, such as a father and son beheaded and hung because they helped the local Afghan police during my time there in 2007, and young girls with acid thrown in their face because they dared go to school. We have seen now, since the Taliban has retaken the country, that it is not allowing women and girls to go to university and, just in the last couple of months, any school at all. It has taken away those rights. It is persecuting religious minorities, ethnic minorities, women, 2SLGBTQ+ groups and, in particular, it is targeting women members of parliament from the former Afghanistan government, former Afghan judges and those Afghans who chose to help us help them during our decade-plus in that country. Why is this so important? If we are unwilling, as a nation, to help these Afghans, or those from any country we travel to and where we depend upon them to achieve our missions, whether it be military, whether it be diplomatic or whether it be Canadian NGOs working in those nations, and then we leave them behind when things go sideways, that speaks to who we are as a nation and what we think of those people we are supposedly trying to help. I will predict what I am going to hear from the parliamentary secretary here shortly. She will talk about how they have accepted 27,000 Afghans here into Canada. My question is this: Out of the 27,000, how many of them were already outside of Afghanistan, already in relative safety? I am not saying that we should not be helping them out, those who were able to flee the country, but my primary concern is about those Afghans still in Afghanistan. We are going to hear about the challenges, logistical and security challenges. I will continue to call BS on that. I talk on a daily basis, or a weekly basis, with former colleagues and NGOs that are moving Afghans and Ukrainians out of these respective countries, out of war zones, and they can get it done very, very quickly. I will close with two simple questions. How many more Afghans need to die before the government takes action? When can Parliament expect an update from the government on the 37 recommendations, and the progress that the Liberal government has made them, that came out of the Special Committee on Afghanistan?

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Context: House Hansard - 83 - Jun/7/22

Feb/2/23 3:06:08 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, Abdullah Hamdard is in Ottawa this week and here today pleading with the Liberal government to get his family out of Afghanistan. Abdullah served alongside our troops in Afghanistan, and his family qualified to come to Canada almost a year ago, but nothing has happened. His brother is now missing, feared dead, and his family is living under daily threats. He personally met the minister on Tuesday. How many more Afghans who have helped Canada need to die before the minister commits to urgently getting Abdullah's family and other Afghans safely to Canada?

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Context: House Hansard - 83 - Jun/7/22

Jun/7/22 11:57:40 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I thank the parliamentary secretary for recognizing my service. I do think a lot of the information we found at the Special Committee on Afghanistan was beneficial. I will not thank him for the history lesson, although I think maybe it was beneficial to some for learning what we studied over the last number of months at the committee. Why would the government not release the reports that would have made our jobs so much easier on committee, especially for the great analysts? My question is simple. Would the parliamentary secretary not agree that it would have made the analysts' job so much easier if they had had the benefit of seeing all the work that had been done already? He does not have to trust me. I actually asked them this yesterday, and they agreed with me that it would have made their job a lot easier. Why would the government not release the reports?

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Context: House Hansard - 70 - May/12/22

Jun/7/22 11:49:58 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, first off, I want to express my disappointment for having to be here tonight to re-address a simple question. It is a question of transparency and openness from the government on lessons learned from the fall of Kabul last year. The first thing I want to do is read into the record the mandate of the Special Committee on Afghanistan. It reads: to conduct hearings to examine and review the events related to the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, including, but not limited to, the government's contingency planning for that event and the subsequent efforts to evacuate, or otherwise authorize entry to Canada of, Canadian citizens, and interpreters, contractors and other Afghans who had assisted the Canadian Armed Forces or other Canadian organizations That was our mandate. I am going to read the definition, from the defence terminus database, of what an after-action review is. It is “A professional discussion of...[an] operational event that focuses on identifying what happened, why it happened, and how it can be improved.” In reality, we are asking for the same thing. It is just to get those after-action reviews. I put a motion forward at the Special Committee on Afghanistan for the government. We brought it up during testimony, and we had Global Affairs Canada officials admit that they had conducted an after-action review or a review of what happened last summer in Kabul. After that, we had defence officials there, including the chief of the defence staff. They admitted that they went through the Canadian Armed Forces after-action review process or post-operational review and conducted that. In fact, they fed into a PCO-led interdepartmental review of what went right, what went wrong and what we needed to improve going forward from last summer, all great stuff that made sense. Considering the mandate of the Special Committee on Afghanistan, would that information not be invaluable to our hard-working analysts and committee members so they can put together the report? I therefore put a motion forward. I asked the officials about this, but unfortunately we did not get the information. I put it forward at committee. Unfortunately, the Liberal members of the committee decided to filibuster. It never got to a vote before we ran out of time, because the Special Committee on Afghanistan is wrapping up. In fact, the chair will table the report tomorrow. I have gone down every possible avenue. I submitted an Order Paper question, a written question, to see if I could get the information that way. Then I stood up during question period, which brings me here tonight to ask for the information. Again, I am just looking to get all of the reports, including any of the draft reports, to committee so we can move forward. We are lacking them, and it was obvious, based on testimony, that the interdepartmental coordination between the three departments involved in this, particularly with respect to immigration, was weak, if not non-existent. The committee was unable to get all of the reports to provide an effective response going forward. This is really the key point that I want to hit. In the end, this is all about setting the conditions for the future. If Canada ever commits, whether it is militarily or diplomatically, to another mission around the globe, we need to rely upon the cultural advisers, interpreters and linguists who are willing to step forward. If they are unwilling to do so and do not trust us to have their backs if things go sideways, as they did in Afghanistan, we are the ones who will lose out. We are likely going to hear from the parliamentary secretary. I am glad he is here to answer my question. However, I think he is going to use national security as an excuse, which is not the case. Ultimately, the sad reality is that the Afghans who should be coming here are the losers in this whole circumstance.

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Context: House Hansard - 70 - May/12/22

May/12/22 3:04:53 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, during testimony at the Afghanistan committee, both Global Affairs Canada and the Canadian Armed Forces confirmed that lessons learned reviews were conducted by their respective departments in regard to the evacuation of Afghans from Kabul. Further testimony confirmed there was an interdepartmental review, led by PCO, conducted. In this case, in the interests of transparency, will the Liberal government release these completed crucial reviews immediately to the Afghanistan committee for inclusion in the committee's mandated report back to Parliament before June 8?

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Context: House Hansard - 53 - Apr/5/22

May/12/22 3:02:59 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, during testimony at the Afghanistan committee, both Global Affairs Canada and the Canadian Armed Forces confirmed that lessons learned reviews were conducted by their respective departments in regard to the evacuation of Afghans from Kabul. Further testimony confirmed that there was an interdepartmental review, led by PCO, conducted. Will the chair of the Afghanistan committee highlight why it is essential that the Liberal government release these crucial reviews immediately to the committee for inclusion in the committee's mandated report back to Parliament by June 8?

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Context: House Hansard - 33 - Feb/17/22

Apr/5/22 3:54:06 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, as always, it is an honour to rise here in the House, not only on behalf of my constituents of Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound but on an issue of such fundamental importance to all Canadians, that of supporting our Canadian Armed Forces and the need to meet our NATO commitment of 2% of our GDP. I plan on taking a slightly different tack in my speech than likely many of the previous speeches that we have heard so far today in order to provide a more fulsome perspective from someone with over 25 years in the Canadian Armed Forces. First, I want to thank every single sailor, soldier, aviator and special forces operator that has served, is still serving and will serve our great country. Why do we need to invest this 2%? As has been clearly laid out in a number of the speeches, the world has changed. I would argue it has actually been very volatile for a number of years now, at least in my military career and in my lifetime, and it will continue to be that volatile and an ever-changing situation. Right now we are facing the absolutely existential threat of Russia to Ukraine and to our NATO allies, but China and terrorism are things that continue to be on the forefront of the frontier that we need to be able to address. My colleague who spoke just prior to me clearly laid out the situation in Ukraine and how Russia was posing an immediate threat not only to Ukraine but to our NATO allies. I would like to provide some additional context to just how important supporting our Canadian Armed Forces is, and how we need to be adaptable and how we need to be resourced to do that. When I first joined, one of my first operations was a domestic operation here in Canada during the ice storm in 1998. It was not something we prepared and trained for in a traditional sense, but due to the phenomenal training that our Canadian Armed Forces and our Canadian Army delivers, it was something our soldiers were well prepared for. My overseas missions were all under the NATO umbrella, with the exception of my final mission in Iraq, but I will get to that because there was a NATO connection there as well. Regarding the complete complexity of what we need to do within the Canadian Armed Forces, we are over there keeping the peace, but we are also monitoring elections and working non-stop with international NGOs and supporting other nations on the ground, including, in some cases, when riots and other situations occur, being that support network to get them out of harm's way. During my second tour in Bosnia, 9/11 happened, and I believe that fundamentally changed the globe as I am sure we could all acknowledge. It changed the dynamic and the ideas of what we were going to be able to do. It then ultimately led to the coalition of the willing to engage in Afghanistan, which then morphed into a NATO mission. I was there in combat in 2007, but ultimately it was our training mission in 2012 that was of much more importance. Unfortunately, we failed. We did not fail completely, but I do believe we failed in delivering on that, as we see now with the Taliban having taken over the reins. However, when we look at Ukraine and the training mission that has been ongoing there over the last number of years, I would argue Canada has played a critical role in supporting Ukraine in that opposition to Russia. When I was Iraq, again, although it was a U.S.-led coalition, I was part of the team that actually stood up the NATO training mission and went in and briefed the Canadian general and his team that was leading that NATO training mission into Iraq. My whole point is that NATO fills this critical role in dealing with threats from around the globe. It is our obligation. We signed up for this at the Wales Summit, and as the Liberal member for Winnipeg North clearly stated in his speech, the strength of NATO and our collective ability to stand up and defend our respective sovereignty and, frankly, even to be able to afford a properly resourced military or defence is by doing it together. Canada made this commitment in 2014, and we need to abide by that international commitment in order to contribute to our part of international peace and security. What does this 2% mean? It essentially means, as some of the other members have said here in the House, that it is pretty much doubling our current expenditures. It is important for everybody to understand just how complicated that is going to be and the impact it will have on the force structure of our Canadian Armed Forces from both capabilities and capacity perspectives. As much as Strong, Secure, Engaged, or SSE, the current defence policy, has some strengths, it alone is insufficient to provide the necessary policy top cover. I don’t profess to have all the answers, but I know that if CAF is properly supported, and this needed investment is made into our military, Canada and CAF will then be much more capable of responding, both domestically and internationally, to anything Canada and NATO requires us to do. As such, I am pushing and will push that, and I will explain a bit more on this later, we need to do a non-partisan, or at least bipartisan, foreign policy review we can agree on, which will then drive a future update to our defence review. How will we do this? First, in order to spend this money and properly resource our Canadian Armed Forces and meet this commitment, the military's biggest challenge half the time is not having that predictable, stable funding. If we do not have this programmed and understand it, it is hard to expend the money. There has been a lot of commentary about where defence spending has lapsed. Part of the challenge with that is that when it lapses we will not be getting that same bang for our buck going forward. Right now the normal inflation is approximately 5.7%, but in some sectors of the defence industry, defence inflation is at 20% in one year. Therefore, if we were planning to buy 10 ships one year, but delayed that by one year, we would then only get eight. I am not professing this is simple. When we are trying to balance a budget and make it so that we are not creating future challenges for the next generation, this needs to be done by working together. So many MPs have already stated the need for fixing our procurement system. This needs to be streamlined. We need one dog to kick, in my opinion, and I am not professing any violence to dogs, as I do like dogs, but my point is that there needs to be one person in charge of our procurement system in order to fix it. As well, we need to invest in our people because they are the most critical resource within our Canadian Armed Forces. I already mentioned the importance of why we need that bipartisan or non-partisan foreign policy and defence review. It is important because it is the key to preventing political interference and delays within our procurement process. I do not want to get into the capabilities or specific platforms because nothing drives me nuts more than hear politicians speaking about plane X or tank Y. We should be talking about capabilities in general, telling our Canadian Armed Forces and military experts what they need to deliver in Canada's interest on the international stage and then letting them come back to us with the best options available and specifically where we can properly spend this increase in our defence budgets. We have already talked about NORAD modernization. I am confident, based on what I have heard so far today, that the Liberal government will include needed funding for NORAD modernization in the budget on Thursday. However, we have to focus on filling in those key gaps within NORAD versus just nibbling around the edges. One comment was made that we have to relook at ballistic missile defence. We have to put more money into our Arctic. We can look at surveillance, UAV capacities and better engineering capabilities. We can put more money into our people, our sailors, soldiers, aircrew and special forces. Special forces is another area we could spend more money. Cyber and strategic lift are also great ideas we can spend money on. In summary, I think I have addressed the why of the motion, which are the threats and our obligation to get to 2%. The how is that it needs to be done through providing predictable funding, fixing the procurement system, investing in our people, investing in key capabilities, and ultimately having a non-partisan or bipartisan foreign policy and defence review. The world needs a Canada that maintains its position as a trusted global security partner and a reliable member of NATO. Without increasing our military spending, the government puts this at risk. Meeting our NATO commitment of spending 2% of GDP today and into the future is essential. Although in military planning hope is not an option, I hope all members of the House will support this motion.

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Context: House Hansard - 29 - Feb/11/22

Feb/17/22 3:03:10 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, here is some of the damning testimony this week from retired generals about the Liberal government's failure during the fall of Kabul and the government's continued lack of leadership. One said, “we were the first embassy to depart. That was very embarrassing”. Another said, “When this crisis was unfolding right in front of our eyes, we then urged the government, as we do now, to create an interdepartmental task force with one leader.” I will ask the same question I asked last week. Will the Prime Minister assign one lead minister to solve this ongoing humanitarian aid crisis?

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Context: House Hansard - 28 - Feb/10/22

Feb/11/22 12:00:45 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, experts, NGOs and veterans have all been critical in their analysis that one of the leading reasons for Canada's failure last summer in saving Afghans' lives was due to a lack of leadership and not having one Liberal minister assigned as the lead department. Testimony this week at the Afghanistan committee indicates nothing has changed, as many of the ongoing issues cross Global Affairs, Immigration and Public Safety. My question is simple. Would the lead minister responsible to coordinate the solutions to this ongoing humanitarian-aid crisis please stand up?

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Feb/10/22 3:04:20 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I will quote an email to the government sent by the Liberal MP for Thunder Bay—Rainy River at the height of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan: “I hate to tell you, but everyone on the ground considers our government’s management of this amounts, so far, to a total disaster.” Afghanistan committee testimony indicates that nothing has changed: ...at this time it is not coming across that Afghanistan is a priority foreign policy issue for Canada. A Canadian moral stance is missing. Why are the Liberal ministers failing to show leadership and accountability in dealing with this urgent humanitarian aid crisis?

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Dec/7/21 5:55:31 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I cannot help myself, based on the comments by the member, to interject and give a little of a different perspective. I agree the mission unfortunately failed. We are seeing the repercussions. However, I am still optimistic about those girls and women who had an opportunity for the better part of two decades to get educated and to live in some semblance of peace and prosperity, which they did not have under the Taliban. I am optimistic that they are going to come back. I predict that one of those individuals who did have that opportunity will be leading Afghanistan in the decades to come. We cannot just turn our backs, and we cannot avoid getting involved as a nation. Canada is privileged to be one of the few countries in the world that can make a difference. We need to continue to do that. It does need to be a whole-of-government affair. It cannot just be military. We need to continue to focus on helping those who need the help.

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Dec/7/21 5:26:15 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, that is a great question, but unfortunately I do not have the right answer. However, it is definitely something we should be looking at and comparing ourselves to. It is truly important and the member asks a valid question that we should be focused on. It is another issue that this committee could focus on. Ultimately, as some of the previous speakers have stated, the U.S. has some 40,000 Afghans out now, so other countries are obviously doing a lot better than we are.

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Dec/7/21 5:24:34 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his question. The short answer is yes. It was already brought up by previous speakers. Our Globemasters have the capacity to bring out hundreds of people per flight. I think the record was almost 800 on one flight alone, so the capacity exists to get these Afghans to Canada in a much more expedited fashion. This is all about risk assessment. We are not getting them directly out of Afghanistan anymore because the Taliban controls everything. However, as we work with the other solutions that I propose, we can definitely bring more of them to Canada faster.

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Dec/7/21 5:23:04 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, as I mentioned, this committee would be there not only for the urgency and to make sure we identify key ways to move it forward, these are measures that have been suggested to the government already, but are not getting traction. By us shining a light on the problem through the committee process, we are going to attract that. As I mentioned, another issue is about learning for the future. If we do not learn from what went right and what went wrong and we do not capture that properly and understand where the challenges are across departments, we are doomed to make the same mistake on a future mission and we are going to have a heck of a lot more trouble getting those interpreters and foreign nationals to work with us in future missions.

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Dec/7/21 5:12:03 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, considering this is my first speech here in the House in this new Parliament, I want to thank the constituents of Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound for giving me the privilege and honour of representing them here once again. I thank my family, all my volunteers and everybody who helped get me back here to the House of Commons. It truly is a privilege. Before getting into the details of this motion, I want to thank all the Daves, Coreys, Pauls, Eleanors, retired generals and so many NGOs and charities that have been working behind the scenes on this issue for months now. This includes the Afghan Strategic Evaluation Team, the Veterans Transition Network, the Journalists for Human Rights, the Afghan Canadian interpreters, Building Markets, Aman Lara and Raven Rae Resources. I also want to thank a former colleague of mine, Greg from Nova Scotia. He has a full-time job running his own business and he comes home at night and spends upward of five to six hours talking to his contacts on the ground in Afghanistan helping get Afghans and Afghan Canadians across the border, facilitating visas and getting them out of that country and to safety. I thank all of these people. I want to address why this motion and this committee is so important. There are two key reasons and we have mentioned these already during the debate. First is we have to learn what went right and what went wrong. Canada cannot make the same mistakes in the future. As I mentioned earlier, it is great to identify what went wrong, but if someone does not learn from it and apply it in the future, it is all a waste of time. This is key for any future diplomatic, humanitarian or military mission, regardless of where it is in the world, as we deal with risks. More importantly, we need to do this so that we can help those Afghans who are still in dire need of our support, and are being actively hunted by the Taliban. Their lives are at risk. To provide some background to the members here in the House who maybe do not know who I am, I spent over 25 years in the military. I spent two deployments in Afghanistan. The first was in 2007 in active combat, where I depended on these interpreters daily in order to communicate, understand the cultural differences and do my job to help give them a better life. The biggest thing I remember from that tour, more than anything, is talking to the local Afghans. They are no different from any one of us. People around the world are all the same. They just want to live in peace and prosperity, put food on the table and allow their children to have a better life than them. Under the Taliban, women and girls cannot go to school. We should always be fighting against regimes like this, no matter where they are in the world. My next deployment was in 2012. I did eight months over there with the Canadian contribution to the NATO training mission. We were actually trying to put the hard work in to develop the institutional capacity of that country. Again, it is impossible to do without cultural advisers and interpreters. We took one of the regional military training centres in Kabul during that deployment and we turned it into a language school. Not to teach them English, but to teach them Pashto and Dari because a lot of the recruits coming through their military or police forces could not read or write to a grade 3 level. It is hard to fight corruption, fraud and other challenges that Afghanistan faces if one cannot communicate. We had many Afghans who were helping in NATO missions, helping Canadians and helping Canada accomplish what we wanted to do in that country and now we are failing them. The Taliban are brutal and I am going to get into a specific example momentarily. Again, as my hon. colleague who spoke just before me, the former shadow minister for defence said, this was predicted; we knew this was coming. The former minister of national defence was briefed on the security situation and the probable Taliban resurgence tied to the U.S. withdrawal over two years ago. Former President Trump gave that deadline and indicated that the U.S. were going to withdraw. This was reiterated by President Biden. The Liberal MP, the member for Thunder Bay—Rainy River raised these concerns two years ago with the Liberal government. Let us go back to some of the situations here. I am going to read from a national media article that I wrote on July 22, months before Kabul fell: Being able to communicate with a population is essential when you are conducting military operations. Without this, it would be next to impossible to ensure the safety of not only the men and women on the operation, but it would have had major consequences for the outcome of the mission. This is why the local interpreters, cultural advisors, and support staff in Afghanistan were so essential to Canada’s mission. They enabled us to be more effective, and quite frankly, without them, there would have been fewer Canadians who would have come home. During my two tours in Afghanistan, I had first-hand experience with these individuals. In 2007, on combat operations in Kandahar, these Afghans provided the essential real-time monitoring of Taliban radio chatter that provided my combat team invaluable warning of impending attacks, ambushes and insurgent movement. During shuras (meetings with Afghan elders/leadership), they allowed us to communicate, and more importantly understand the cultural nuances that enabled trust and situational awareness. They took on this vital role before, during and post-combat. I’ll remind the Canadian government, and all Canadians, that the Taliban does not follow international law. During my deployment in 2007, my combat team escorted an Afghan National Army company to Ghorak to reinforce an Afghan National Police outpost. Just prior to our arrival, solely because the boy delivered bread to the police, a local eight-year-old boy was hung, and his father beheaded by the Taliban. While talking with my own interpreters at that time, they shared their own concerns that this is why many used aliases and always kept their faces covered during interactions in order to protect themselves and their families. I share this horrific tragedy to highlight why action must be taken immediately to bring the interpreters, support staff and their families to Canada. These Afghans faced danger every day in order to help Canada and were willing to give their youth, and their lives for our shared goal of a freer and more prosperous Afghanistan. These Afghans stepped up for Canada. Now, in their time of need, Canada needs to step up for them To get to the motion at hand and why this committee is so important, I am going to actually offer a bunch of solutions that this committee should focus on, providing that we get the support for it today. They have come from these NGOs, charities, people and former veterans who are working behind the scenes, as they were shared with me. Priority one is to stand up an interdepartmental task force focused on safeguarding and evacuating eligible Afghans remaining in Afghanistan. Priority must be on having a single leader to run the interdepartmental task force empowered to coordinate and execute this. The feedback that I have been receiving is that for GAC and IRCC, during the evacuation operations by our Canadian Armed Forces, interdepartmental communications were not working. Additional resources have to be brought to bear. IRCC staff are being overwhelmed and likely experiencing vicarious PTSD because they do not have the policies, support and leadership to solve the problems. Another thing that this committee could be focused on is application processing as 45% of the applicants that certain NGOs are tracking still have not had their initiating email to IRCC responded to in order to make that application. Only 20% of those who NGOs believe are eligible have been issued IRCC numbers that suggest that they might be successful. None of the employees that Canadian NGOs are tracking who work in Afghanistan to advance Canada's mission have been successful in their application to come to Canada under the special immigration measures. The majority of applicants with approved applications do not have passports. A mechanism needs to be put in place to get these people who do not have passports out of Afghanistan. Applying for a passport at this time can result in a family being targeted and killed. Next, we need to leverage the charities, the NGOs and the veterans. The Canadian government needs to find a way to leverage our partners and our vets to get biometrics into Kabul. This would allow the government and NGOs to move people out of the country directly without having to accumulate them in third countries. There need to be less restrictive funding parameters. I understand that this funding needs to be tracked but right now it is too bureaucratic, too complicated to get the help needed as mentioned to support these safe houses and more. In conclusion, we need this special committee. We need to learn what went right and what went wrong and we need to ensure the appropriate urgent actions are taken by the government. These Afghans stepped up for Canada. Now, in their time of need, Canada needs to step up for them.

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Dec/7/21 1:26:10 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I will first make a quick correction to something the member on the government side said: 158 Canadians died in Afghanistan, not 159. The member talked throughout his speech about partisanship and that whole angle, yet he spent more time talking about the official opposition and history than the actual motion at hand, which is the importance of the urgency in taking care of these Afghans who risked their lives to support Canadians. Now we are leaving them behind. He suggested the standing committees as possible solutions to this. However, in the last Parliament, particularly at the defence committee, we witnessed Liberal members filibuster non-stop, and he wonders why part of the motion is to deal with this issue. Will the member stand up for those Afghans who helped save Canadian lives and vote for this motion, or will he not?

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