I want to congratulate you, Mr. Speaker, on your appointment. I wish you all the best in this endeavour.
I also want to convey my best wishes to the member for Ajax—Pickering and congratulate him on his appointment as a parliamentary secretary. He will soon learn that doing late shows is probably one of the least attractive aspects of the job, because for the next four minutes he has to tell the House why he is not answering the question that the minister only took 30 seconds to not answer. I wish him well in his responses and look forward to working with him over the course of the next few years.
I had a very simple question for the minister, which he did not answer. I asked him how much it was going to cost to close Camp Mirage and how much it was going to cost to open the Kuwait base. The minister said that my figures of $300 million were grossly exaggerated, so I simply asked him what is the number and thus far we do not know. Hopefully in the realm of time the parliamentary secretary will actually tell us the cost of closing Camp Mirage and then opening Kuwait. It does open up a larger series of questions with respect to the government's plans for opening all of the other bases.
We read in the press that the government is proposing to open bases in Senegal, Kenya, Tanzania, Singapore and South Korea. It has already concluded deals with Jamaica and Germany and is working on the deal with Kuwait. None of these things one would imagine is cheap. It is not only the cost of opening the base, but it is the cost of maintaining the base.
This also begs the question, what are we doing in all of these countries if it is for no other reason than to have refuelling stops around the world? Bases are not opened for no reason at all. It would lead one to the question of what are the government's plans with respect to opening bases all over the world?
I am looking forward to the response from the hon. parliamentary secretary. I hope that his response will be somewhat more forthcoming than the minister's response. I wonder if he could actually tell us the cost of closing Camp Mirage and opening Kuwait. In the fullness of time, could he possibly tell us how much he anticipates that the military would be spending on the opening of all of these other bases as well?