For Canadians who do not believe in co-incidences, it was no co-incidence the announcement by Trudeau in his Throne Speech that our men and women in the service of our Canadian (soon to be dis-armed) Forces would be facing cutbacks to be a ‘leaner’ force was followed by the appointment of Omar Alghabra as Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs and a misleading opinion piece by Chretien-era appointee Senator Romeo Dallaire.
The message of a ‘leaner’ Canadian military, Trudeau doublespeak for cuts, follows the first Trudeau pronouncement to ‘back away’ from our Western Coalition partners in the fight against international terrorism. Canadian Foreign Policy is taking an extreme shift to the left.
Saudi-born Alghabra, former head of the Canadian Arab Federation, has been out-spoken in his support of terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah. Part of the boycott Israel lobby, as the Parliamentary Secretary in charge of consular affairs, Alghabra has a publically undefined role in determining which migrants will be brought to Canada.
The indifference by Dallaire for Canadian soldiers to throw away their sand-coloured berets, berets that were earned standing shoulder-to-shoulder with our NATO allies with a lot of precious Canadian blood in the dust of Afghanistan, in exchange for blue berets, should have Canadians even more alarmed.
There is an ongoing and serious security threat in the Middle East posed by international terrorism. The threat is not only a threat to innocent victims in that war-torn part of the world. It represents an active threat to international security and stability to our allies and to Canada, as we have seen in Paris and more recently San Bernardino here in North America. The brutal murders of Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent and Corporal Nathan Cirillo on Canadian soil means no Canadian is safe. This is why the Canadian Armed Forces must continue to be part of the solution as full, participating members of the international coalition against terrorism.
While Dallaire was quick to use misleading figures on the number of Canadians currently serving on UN peacekeeping missions, with the inference our Conservative Government somehow did not believe in peace, Dallaire should have acknowledged the drop in Canadian peacekeepers happened during the Chretien ‘decade of darkness’ years starting in 1996, the last year of the UN Mission in Rwanda. Canada’s UN troop contributions dropped in one year from 2,585 in 1995 to 254 by 1996.
Using peacekeeping as an excuse, Canadian soldiers will be ordered to abandon the honour and recognition we earned in Afghanistan. By pulling them back from the international coalition fighting terrorism, it will allow Trudeau to make larger cuts. Cutting our military and abandoning our allies is absolutely the wrong direction for Canada. As your Member of Parliament I will remind the government of its obligation to our NATO partners and its responsibility to protect the freedom, democracy, safety, and security of all Canadians.