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Canada still intends to pull the jets out, Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan reiterated this week. Why? Neither he, the Prime Minister nor any other member of the Liberal government has quite been able to articulate why. In fact, the Liberals, while insisting the jets will come home, have actually done an excellent job demonstrating why they should stay. In television appearances this week, Minister Sajjan said Canada didn’t want to create a “gap” in the coalition for pulling the jets out, and it was investigating ways the country could contribute more to the fight.

Let us make sure we have this straight: the Liberals want to pull the jets out of the coalition, but not in a way that creates a gap, and is investigating how to do more while pledging to honour its commitment to do less. One would like to believe this was all some sort of clever disinformation campaign, intended to confuse ISIL, and leave them wondering as to our next move. But the reality is less interesting, and sadder — the government simply doesn’t know what it’s doing.

More to the point, it doesn’t know how to do what it promised to do. The bombing mission they have pledged to end is the right role for Canada. The Liberals may insist that our relatively small share of the overall sorties — around 2 per cent of missions are carried out by Canadian fighters — is not considerable enough to be missed, but then again, fret that pulling the jets out would leave the coalition with gaps. Proposals to bulk up our ground training mission, intelligence gathering capabilities and to assist in rapidly evacuating wounded allied troops to proper medical facilities behind the lines all have merit. Likewise proposals to provide more humanitarian aid.