President-elect Barack Obama's pledge to boost U.S. military operations in Afghanistan "will not change Canada's position" on a troop pullout in 2011, Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon said Sunday.
Cannon said Canada will start to withdraw soldiers from the war-torn country on schedule, as promised by Prime Minister Stephen Harper during the federal election.
"While we welcome the Americans' renewed interest in Afghanistan, particularly president-elect Obama's position during the campaign, we nonetheless want to make it perfectly clear that the U.S. position will not change Canada's position as defined in our parliamentary resolution," Cannon said in an interview on CTV's Question Period.
"We will be pulling out our military forces in 2011 and this is quite clear."
The 2011 deadline was decided by Parliament last March. While campaigning in September, Harper said Canada would not extend its military campaign in Afghanistan any further, citing Canadians' growing weariness of the war.
But NDP foreign affairs critic Paul Dewar said the sincerity of the announcement was suspect given that Harper made the promise during an election after refusing to set a hard date in Parliament.
"One just wonders if indeed we will be out because this wasn't brought to Parliament, it was simply an announcement during an election that we'd be fully withdrawn from Afghanistan in 2011," Dewar said on Question Period.
During the U.S. presidential campaign, Obama outlined his intent to divert military resources from Iraq to Afghanistan to fight Taliban forces and hunt down Osama bin Laden.
In a mid-October speech, Obama said he would send two or three more combat brigades to Afghanistan. One brigade usually has between 3,500 and 4,000 troops.
Although, Harper called to congratulate Obama shortly after his victory in last week's U.S. presidential election, it's unclear if the two spoke about the Afghanistan war.
The economy appears to be foremost in their minds, and the two leaders will work together on financial concerns that affect both countries, Cannon said Sunday.
He also speculated that Obama and Harper may begin work on a North American plan to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and tackle global warming.
Obama said during his campaign that he plans to implement a cap-and-trade system to reduce greenhouse gases 80 per cent by the year 2050. The Harper government's goal is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 20 per cent by 2020.
Harper will have difficulty reconciling his environmental plan with Obama's, predicted Liberal foreign affairs critic Navdeep Bains.
"Mr. Harper has to recognize that he can't defend or undervalue the importance of reducing greenhouse gas emissions that come from the oilsands," Bains said on Question Period. "Barack Obama has been very clear about his position on that as well."
