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In Justin Trudeau’s mandate letter to defense minister Harjit Sajjan he ordered him to “end Canada’s combat mission in Iraq and Syria.” But as former defense minister Jason Kenney, who has bravely served this country as a four-star collector of World War II paraphernalia, pointed out with this graphic on Twitter, our airstrikes continue. 

Of course he was missing a few statistics, like how many civilians our 500-pound iron fragmentation bombs have killed. Up to 27 civilians may have been killed in a single Canadian airstrike, as reported by left wing rag The Pentagon. They also reported that Canada’s military lawyers said there are “no obligations for the Canadian Armed Forces to conduct an investigation” of the incident. We’re peacekeepers, not record keepers. 

So there’s no obligation to the families of those civilians, but we do feel an obligation to the American government, who started this perpetual war in 2003. And to the Kurds and Iraqi security forces, who have been accused of unlawful killings, abductions, and revenge attacks against civilians. And to our noble allies in Saudi Arabia, who are indiscriminately bombing civilians in Yemen and also arming a group that includes Al Qaeda.  

And this deep sense of obligation to our benevolent allies led Minister Sajjan to worry that fulfilling his mandate would leave a “capability gap” for the coalition. But a capability gap is what Canadians voted for, because some of them are capable of learning from history that dropping bombs will only lead to more anger, more hate and more violence.

Scott Vrooman

Scott has written and performed comedy for TV (Conan, Picnicface, This Hour Has 22 Minutes), radio (This is That), and the web (Vice, Funny or Die, College Humor, The Toronto Star, The Huffington Post,...