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The government says it won’t tell parliamentarians how much the military thinks its six-month mission in Iraq will cost. It’s also withholding the figure from the budgetary watchdog.

The military said earlier this month it had provided the government with an estimated cost for the mission. While other countries have made public the estimated costs of their involvement in Iraq, Defence Minister Rob Nicholson told the House of Commons defence committee Tuesday there would be no figures disclosed until the mission was over.

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“We will make those costs known when they are known. It’s a little difficult to project in five months in terms of what we will do,” said Nicholson. “We will report the exact cost for Operation Impact through existing parliamentary mechanisms, once they are finalized. But, as reports from Human Rights Watch and others show, there is a human cost to doing nothing.”

Lt.-Gen. Jonathan Vance, senior officer responsible for managing all Canadian military operations, said three weeks ago that the military is providing cost estimates to the government. And Chief of Defence Staff Gen. Tom Lawson told the CBC Saturday that the military had provided a cost estimate to the government.