The answer provided by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Defence during debate raises more questions about what the government knew, and when they knew, about war crime allegations.
Canadians can be proud of the soldiers, who immediately reported concerns the Iraqi forces they had been sent by the Trudeau Government to train were engaged in war crimes.
When I asked why those concerns were ignored, the Minister of Defence claimed he didn’t know.
The problem for this Minister, who never seems to know anything happening in his department, is that according to his own Parliamentary Secretary, if the Department did not know, it sure acted like it.
According to the Parliamentary Secretary, the Canadian Forces are no longer training the particular Iraqi Forces implicated in the war crime allegations, and the CF have implemented rigorous screening protocols to select trainees.
Sending trainers to Iraq was a signature Trudeau foreign policy. The Liberals have admitted the policy was not well thought out before being implemented. Now they expect us to believe these policy changes just magically happened and had nothing to do with reports they were training war criminals.
Trudeau made a quip about whipping out our fighter jets and traded in air cover for ground troops to train war criminals, making them better at what they do. Trudeau’s bad policy led to Canadians training people complicit in rape and torture.
Now the Liberals claim they did not know they were training war criminals but have established a policy to screen out war criminal trainees.