Sparring over Canada’s air war in Syria

The debate over Canada’s acceptance of Syrian refugees — the subject of tear-choked addresses this week by all three major party leaders — began settling on to more familiar partisan turf Friday as Prime Minister Stephen Harper and NDP Leader Tom Mulcair sparred over Canada’s military role in the conflict.

Harper, Mulcair and Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau each in their own way have acknowledged that a more focused humanitarian effort is needed to speed the movement of displaced Syrian families into Canada. Their emotional pledges to do better followed revelations Thursday that the family of a drowned three-yearold Syrian boy, photographed lying in the surf of a Turkish beach, had aspired to come to Canada.

But the common spirit of compassion, unusual in the midst of a federal election, began fraying before Thursday was over, and by Friday the bitter ideological divisions were back out in plain view.

Mulcair dismissed military action, specifically Canada’s current bombing campaign in Syria and Iraq, as a solution to the refugee flood that is overwhelming Europe and captivating worldwide public attention.

Mulcair said the gut-wrenching plight of Alan Kurdi, his brother Ghalib and their mother, Rehanna is not the kind of tragedy that can be solved by military force.

“When I hear the answers from the prime minister, saying, ‘Well, more war is the solution.’ Well, no amount of military action would have saved that child on that beach,” said Mulcair.

Asked if there was any role at all for Canada’s military in stopping the refugee crisis, Mulcair was emphatic: “The NDP disagrees with the use of Canada’s armed forces in that conflict. We’ve been clear on that since the beginning.”

At a Conservative rally in Whitehorse, Harper pounced, calling the NDP’s approach a “cop out” that is “deeply ideological.”

“It is deeply wrong and it is out of step with what Canadians believe,” Harper said.

There’s nothing contradictory about helping refugees and also launching an aerial bombardment of fighters with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, he said.

He then moved to pivot the issue away from whether Canada is doing enough fast enough to assist refugees and toward safer Conservative territory of national security.

Stopping ISIL, Harper argued, is necessary to stem the “root cause” of the refugee flood and also to protect Canada from terrorism.

“Forget about how wrong that is from a humanitarian, compassionate sense,” Harper said of ending the effort to stop the Islamic extremists.

He then questioned why Canadians “would allow our own security to be threatened in that way, (allowing) a group like this to set itself up as an empire in the middle of the world to launch terrorist attacks against us.”

Mulcair argued the humanitarian crisis predates ISIL and goes back to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

“The NDP doesn’t think more bombing and more war is the solution,” he said.

The debate revives an ongoing policy battle that’s continued since the Conservatives first committed six CF-18 fighter jets to the Iraqi and Syrian war zone last October.

For New Democrats and Conservatives, their polar opposite positions have the happy byproduct of squeezing Liberals in the middle.

Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau focused on the logistics of bringing Syrian refugees to Canada more quickly.

“There’s been a bit of a Catch-22 that the UN can’t designate someone until they’re accepted in Canada, and that they can’t be accepted in Canada until the UN designates them,” Trudeau said.