Just show me the troops, Jack.

After getting his hands on the briefing notes issued to Gordon O'Connor during the transition of government, NDP leader Jack Layton is suggesting that the Canadian Forces has, to paraphrase, "excess capacity" giving Canada the ability to deploy up to 1200 troops to Lebanon as part of a 15,000 member peacekeeping force.

Canada has 1,200 troops available to respond to global missions, a military briefing note says, contradicting claims by Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor that the army is stretched too thin to consider other big deployments.

The document would appear to back Liberal assertions that, as a government, they committed Canada to the Afghan mission only after top military leaders assured them the Canadian Forces had the capacity to help elsewhere in the world, notably in Darfur.

Since then, the new Conservative government has cited Canada's deployment of 2,300 troops to Afghanistan as the big reason it cannot deploy troops elsewhere.

Calling for immediate deployment of troops as peacekeepers in Lebanon, NDP Leader Jack Layton said Prime Minister Stephen Harper and O'Connor haven't been "fully truthful" about the state of the military.

"Given that we quite clearly ... have the capacity to assist ... what's the real reason we're not responding?" Layton asked in an interview.

"The fact that Canadians have been denied the knowledge that we have the ability to assist is certainly shocking to me."

That Harper and O'Connor are less than truthful is not in question, although I'm calling Layton on this one.

It might be more useful to identify what those troops are. 1200 available troops does not translate into 1200 rifles. While there may be 1200 troops available for contingency operations, if they are deployed for more than 6 months there is a requirement to prepare a subsequent rotation. I would be somewhat surprized if a portion of those 1200 supposedly "available" troops did not actually exist, save for the paper battalions. (If Layton isn't familiar with that term, it's due time he learned.)

What would end up happening would be similar to the effect of the Balkans peacekeeping missions: Not enough time between rotations for the troops carrying the load. They end up exhausted, fed up and bitter... and walk out the main gate before they have to go back again.

All of that, however, is irrelevent when another factor is applied.

George Bush's good buddy, Steve Harper, following the lead of the American Cheney administration, clearly and without reservation, lined-up behind Israel. Canada is not neutral, is not detached from both sides of the conflict and cannot accept a mission in which Canada is expected to be viewed as an honest broker.

Layton could have made more noise about that at the time. And, he should have crucified Harper for his "measured response" comment.