Prime Minister Stephen Harper vowed virtually all Canadian soldiers will leave Afghanistan by the end of 2011, making some of his most definitive statements yet on Canada’s future role there in an interview Wednesday with Canwest News Service.

Parliament has already decided the combat mission, involving about 2,500 troops centred around Kandahar, will end in 2011. The Department of National Defence has started preparing plans to bring the soldiers home.

But at various times over the past two years since that decision was made, there has been some discussion about using Canadian Forces personnel in a non-combat capacity or to station soldiers in a more peaceful part of the country.

Harper ruled out such a possibility.

“We will not be undertaking any kind of activity that requires a significant military force protection, so it will become a strictly civilian mission.

“We will continue to maintain humanitarian and development missions, as well as important diplomatic activity in Afghanistan. But we will not be undertaking any activities that require any kind of military presence, other than the odd guard guarding an embassy.”

Harper also said Canada and its NATO allies have lowered their objectives for the mission in Afghanistan.

“I think the reality is that all actors over the past few years have been downgrading their expectations of what can be achieved in Afghanistan,” Harper said.

“But it is still important that we have a viable, functioning state in Afghanistan that has some acceptable democratic and rule of law norms. If we don’t, we run the serious risk of returning in Afghanistan to what we had before. No matter what differences people have on the mission, everybody agrees that the mission has the purpose to ensure that Afghanistan does not return to being a failed state that is an incubator of terrorism.”

Since Canada established its military presence in Afghanistan in 2002, 138 soldiers have died there. Most recently, on Dec. 30, four soldiers and a journalist — the Calgary Herald’s Michelle Lang — died when their armoured vehicle hit an improvised explosive device four kilometres south of Kandahar city.

The mission has also claimed the lives of a Canadian diplomat and two aid workers.

Harper said there are still outstanding questions to be resolved about the role and purpose of Canadian aid officials and Canadian diplomats in Afghanistan after 2011.

“We have been working on those answers but the bottom line is that the military mission will end in 2011,” said the prime minister.

Harper also doused speculation he’s gunning for a general election soon.

“I have no desire to have a spring election and I don’t think anybody does. I certainly don’t think the public does,” he said.

Harper has made those kinds of statements before, though. In the fall of 2008, he went against the spirit of his own fixed election date law and asked Gov. Gen. Michaelle Jean to dissolve Parliament, saying that the opposition parties were blocking any advance of his government’s agenda.

But when asked to assure Canadians that, so long as this spring’s budget gets the support of the House of Commons, he would not force an election, Harper said neither his party nor, he believes, the opposition parties want a campaign this spring.

“Canadians have given us a mandate — it is a minority mandate –we know we have to work in that context and we will continue to try to do so,” Harper said.

Parliament stands prorogued, or suspended, until March 3, when MPs will be recalled to hear a speech from the throne — Harper’s fifth since taking office in 2006 — which will be followed the next day by a federal budget.

The Commons votes on both the throne speech and the budget. The budget vote is always a matter of confidence and the vote on the speech from the throne is usually a matter of confidence as well. If the government loses a confidence vote at any time, a general election is the result. If not, the next fixed date for a federal election is in the fall of 2012.

Harper said both the budget and the throne speech will demonstrate his government’s commitment to follow through on the second and final year of its economic action plan, spending billions more to fight the lingering effects of the recession.

But he said both documents will also lay out some of the things his government will aim to do next year, once the stimulus spending plan is over, to deal with a significant budgetary deficit.

“We do have to cast our minds in terms of the economy, in terms of our budget, to tackling the deficit,” Harper said. “That will obviously be the next phase to ensure that the extraordinary measures we’ve had to undertake don’t result in a permanent deficits. Our focus will start to be on exit strategies from the extraordinary fiscal measures we’ve undertaken.”

The deficit this year will top $55 billion and is forecast at more than $45 billion for the fiscal year ending March 30, 2011.

Asked if he will announce new spending restraint programs in this budget, Harper declined to speculate, but said he had given each of his ministers new “comprehensive mandate letters” over the Christmas break instructing each to re-examine their priorities given the fact that resources will be limited.

“We’ll be talking about . . . how to continue to advance key economic priorities in a period of constrained spending growth which we will need to see in the next few years,” Harper said. “We still have to be able to advance key files that will continue to build the strength of the Canadian economy.”

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