Report From Parliament's Hill - Oct 12th

By Prince George - Peace River M.P. Jay Hill

   

The Questions We Should Ask About Canada’s Afghanistan Mission

Last week, a national poll found public support is rising for the Canadian Forces mission to Afghanistan.  Whatever the results, I don’t put much faith into the polls conducted so far concerning the mission.

Many Canadians are having difficulty grasping why our military men and women are in Afghanistan, what they are accomplishing and why 40 soldiers have made the ultimate sacrifice. 

I have previously admitted my responsibility as an elected representative and as a government MP to better communicate the mission’s objectives.  However, if the pollsters want to better gauge Canadians’ opinions on the mission, they should ask more informative questions. 

Under the category of “I couldn’t have said it better myself”, I would like to share the controversial yet thought-provoking polling suggestions of retired Major-General Lewis Mackenzie.  Here are the questions he proposes pollsters ask Canadians: 

• Do you support letting the Taliban return to power in Afghanistan? If your answer is “yes”, please go on to the next questions.
• Do you support beheading teachers in front of their class if they permit even one girl to attend?
• Do you support denying all Afghan women the right to visit a doctor, as there are no female doctors permitted by the Taliban and male doctors are not allowed to examine female patients?
• Do you support the government's right to execute women by blowing out their brains in front of thousands of cheering onlookers in a football stadium because the victims were seen in the company of men other than their husbands?
• Do you support the actions of a suicide bomber who, just before he blows himself up beside elderly Muslims waiting to obtain papers for a once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to Mecca, picks up a child and presses her against his explosive vest before detonating himself?

Pollsters and politicians alike need to remind Canadians of these realities.  Afghanistan does not want to return to a Taliban rule that promotes these atrocities and it does not want to resume exporting terrorism around the world.  Afghanistan’s first democratically-elected leader, President Hamid Karzai, came to Canada last month and implored us to not abandon the Afghan people and allow the Taliban to take root once again. 

If we did, what would happen to the women who now make up 28 percent of Afghan’s elected parliament?  What would happen to the roughly two million girls who are now attending school?  What would happen to the 4.7 million Afghan refugees who have been able to return home thanks to the stability and security our Canadian soldiers help to provide?

The most convincing arguments in support of the mission to Afghanistan have come from our soldiers who have seen the plight of the Afghan people first-hand and from the families of those Canadian soldiers who have died trying to help them. 

Our most recent fallen soldier, Trooper Mark Wilson, a father of two young boys, relayed his sentiments about the Afghan mission in a letter he sent to his brother,   “I can’t believe they are paying me to do this.  I would do it for free.”

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