The Harper government has unveiled a new motion to end the Canadian military mission in the volatile Kandahar region of Afghanistan by the end of 2011. And the Liberals appear ready to support it, apparently removing one possible election trigger.
The motion adopts wording from a Liberal amendment, though the Tories have the military leaving six months later than in the Liberal proposal.
"I don't think it's a deal-breaker," a spokesperson for Liberal leader St�phane Dion said of the six-month difference.
"We're quite pleased that they've come quite a ways toward adopting what we've proposed."
The Tory motion also says the mission will focus on training and reconstruction, as the Liberals have demanded.
Dion wants to analyze the motion in detail before announcing if it will be supported by his party. But the initial warm response to the motion by his office suggests Liberal backing of the government motion to be a done deal.
Liberal defence critic Denis Coderre cautiously welcomed the new motion.
"There's progress that there's an end date,'" he said. "It seems that if they're taking our own wording it sends a clear message that we've been doing our homework and now there's room."
If the Liberals accept the new wording and agree to support the motion, it will remove one of several possible triggers for a spring election.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said the vote on extending the Afghan mission, to be held next month, will be a matter of confidence.
Harper spoke about tHe motion at the Conference of Defence Associations in Ottawa Thursday morning.
"This motion confirms our commitment (in Afghanistan) is not open-ended," Harper said.
Harper called the government motion a clear, bi-partisan consensus between their original motion, which acted on many of the recommendations of the independent panel led by former Liberal MP John Manley on the Afghanistan mission, and the proposed Liberal amendments.
"There is fundamental common ground," Harper said of the Liberal and Conservative positions.
Waiting for NATO decisions
Originally, the Tories called for the combat mission in the dangerous Kandahar region to be extended to the end of 2011, assuming NATO met their demands for additional troops and equipment. The motion did not rule out any further extensions of the mission.
Dion countered last week with a lengthy amendment calling for a new mission to begin next February, focused on reconstruction and the training of Afghan forces rather than hunting Taliban insurgents. The amendment also called for an end to the mission by February 2011 and for complete withdrawal of Canadian troops from Afghanistan by July 2011.
The Liberal amendment also required that NATO agrees to rotate the leadership of the combat role in Kandahar to another country. If that does not happen, the Liberal say, Canada should withdraw all of its troops next February.
Harper mentioned during his speech that he was working the phones lately, talking to many leaders of NATO countries about the Afghanistan mission.
Both the Bloc Quebecois and NDP are adamantly opposed to any extension of the mission, currently scheduled to end next February.
During his speech Thursday, Harper also promised "stable and predictable" funding for the military in the future, on top of previous promises of new equipment.
He said that the military's automatic annual budget increase would be going up from 1.5 per cent to two per cent starting in the 2011-2012 fiscal year.
Harper said that the new funding should do away with Canada's traditional military contrast between "being armed to the teeth, (or) being armed to the toe."
He was referring to what many Canadian historians have noted -- that Canada's military has been under-funded during peacetime, followed by periods of massive build-ups responding to world conflicts (both World Wars, Korea, Afghanistan.)
"The successful pursuit of all of Canada's interests around the world - trade, investment, diplomatic and humanitarian -- ultimately depends on security," Harper said in a news release. "That's why we need to build a first-class modern military and keep it that way."
With files from The Canadian Press
