Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper in an election debate on Monday defended the nation’s air strikes against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria, while his political rivals called for a pullback.
The New Democrats, if elected, would end the military mission, while the Liberals said they would withdraw Canadian war planes, but continue training Kurdish forces in Iraq.
“This [Islamic State] is a group that would slaughter literally millions of people in its wake, has a stated intention to launch terrorist attacks around the world, including against this country, and has indicated it has the capacity to do that,” Harper said.
The aerial campaign, Harper added, is “the only way to keep them in their positions.”
Canada has deployed CF-18 jets to the region until March next year, as well as about 70 special forces to train Kurds in northern Iraq.
In the aftermath of two attacks in Ottawa and rural Quebec in October last year, a majority of Canadians have told pollsters they support the military mission against Islamic State.
At Monday’s debate, New Democratic Party leader Thomas Mulcair remained steadfast in his opposition to the bombing campaign.
“We should not be involved in the combat mission,” Mulcair said.
Tying the Harper administration’s hawkish foreign policy to his ramping up of the powers of Canada’s spy agency, Liberal leader Justin Trudeau accused Harper of sowing fear.
“[Harper] wants us to be afraid that there is a terrorist hiding behind every leaf and rock,” Trudeau said.
In May, the Conservative government pushed through a bitterly opposed anti-terror law dramatically expanding the powers and reach of Canada’s spy service.
It criminalized the promotion of terrorism, made it easier for police to arrest and detain individuals without charge, and expanded the Canadian Security Intelligence Service’s mandate from intelligence-collection to actively thwarting terror plots and spying outside Canada.
Harper has said the new measures are also needed to stem a tide of young Canadian men and women traveling abroad to join the Islamic State group, but critics decried bill C-51 as an unprecedented assault on civil rights which lacks oversight.
Trudeau suggested that Mulcair, who vowed to repeal the bill, was “playing a similar politics of fear... talking about police states and taking away our rights,” which Mulcair denied.
The leaders in the first ever election debate devoted entirely to foreign policy also sparred over Arctic sovereignty, foreign aid, the Syrian refugee crisis, Russia and Ukraine, Canada-US relations, the Iran nuclear deal, greenhouse gas emissions and trade.
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
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