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Two things are obvious from parsing Sajjan’s remarks. One is that the Trudeau government has been scrambling to figure out its looming African mission. The other is for reasons known only to itself the government is not keen to have Parliament debate this and provide its blessing. Part of the explanation for how long it has taken is that the Liberals appear to have discovered — long after their upbeat campaign pledge to return to UN peacekeeping — that such endeavours today are far more dangerous than the benign missions of the 1970s and ‘80s.

Because of the information vacuum from the political echelon there has been intense speculation among the troops about whether the current high-readiness brigade from Western Canada would be tapped for the first rotation of the open-ended African mission or whether French-speakers from the brigade in Quebec whose year on high-readiness status ended about five weeks ago would go.

There have been rumours the RCAF may be asked to provide a strong helicopter and/or C-130 Hercules airlift component or hub. If true, that would immediately eat up at least 200 of the 600 troops that Canada has said it would send to Africa. This would leave the army with not much more to do than protect the air crews and maintainers and the until now seldom mentioned small army of public servants who are to deploy with the troops as part of Ottawa’s whole-of-government team.

Until the military brass knows where it is going, and for what purpose, it cannot begin to identify which kind of troops to send. Once it does, every man and woman selected must be vetted to ensure they are in good mental and physical health and that their families are squared away. After that there must be months of mission-specific security training and cultural briefings.

Despite the intense interest in Ottawa about Canada’s first significant peacemaking mission since 17 years ago in East Timor, nothing is going to happen in Mali or its neighbours until at least next February or March.