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If Canadian troops are now actively engaging ISIL forces, helping speed the collapse of its odious caliphate, we would be delighted. We opposed the Liberals’ decision to end our combat mission and would welcome a reversal of it. Some media reports claim military sources have told them that Canadian sniper teams are actively involved against ISIL beyond this single sniper incident. If so, good.

But the government should not have kept this reversal a secret from the public.

Photo by THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick/File

On Thursday, the military implied that there had been no reversal. “As stated multiple times in the past, members of the Canadian Special Operations Task Force do not accompany leading combat elements, but enable the Iraqi security forces who are in a tough combat mission,” a military spokesperson said. That’s fair, but in the context of snipers, also meaningless. Snipers are not typically members of leading combat elements. That’s the whole point of snipers; they’re required to be effective over long ranges precisely because they’re not usually deployed at the front. Hypothetically speaking, the military could deploy a thousand sniper teams to Iraq and set them loose on ISIL from miles away. The resulting devastation to the enemy would not technically require the deployment of Canadian troops to the front. But it would, of course, be absurd to then argue that combat was not occurring.

Similarly, artillery and tank rounds can kill over even longer ranges, also well back from the front. So can our CF-18s, which engage targets from such distances the pilots often never see their targets. But if the Canadian military sent artillery, tanks and CF-18 jets to Iraq and set them loose on the enemy, we would not pretend we were engaged in anything other than combat. As these examples make clear, there is no logical basis for treating sniper teams any differently. Combat is binary: you’re either in it or you’re not. And if we’re actively choosing to get involved (and not just in defensive action), we’re engaged in a combat mission.

And so we should be. Canada clearly has some of the world’s best snipers, and in ISIL, we have an enemy deserving of total destruction. The Liberals have recently spoken of Canada’s need to wield hard power, and this is exactly that. Let’s use it, but use it honestly. The public supported military action against ISIL before. It likely would again. The government simply needs to be honest about the good and necessary work our soldiers are already doing.

National Post

An earlier version of this story misstated the location of the sniper team. The location has been corrected.