David Collenette

[Governor General, February 25th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, if the hon. member had read the defence document in the budget he would have noted that we intend to look at ways we can divest ourselves of the Challenger aircraft to transport the Prime Minister and the Governor General for security reasons without

having these continual complaints from the opposition about using these aircraft.

If we can do it more efficiently, we will. I do not think it is appropriate and part of our parliamentary tradition to criticize the Governor General or Her Majesty the Queen in the House of Commons. I hope he will not be raising these questions this summer when Her Majesty the Queen visits Canada and we transport her around.

[Reorganization Of The College In Kingston, February 25th, 1994]

It is in the budget documents. We are not lying. The fact is that after the changes we announced this week in the budget, the proportion of defence spending in Quebec goes up 3 per cent, more than many of the other provinces in the country.

[Reorganization Of The College In Kingston, February 25th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, there have been studies in the department for a number of years on the need to consolidate a number of facilities. We have done this with other bases across the country. The colleges are no exception.

I said in French a few minutes ago that the report quoted is not a report of the department. It is a report which was commissioned by the former minister who had a fixation about Quebec getting its fair share of the pie. It is true there has been a lower proportion of expenditures on defence in Quebec as a result of historical trends. However, we tried. We admit that.

[Reorganization Of The College In Kingston, February 25th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, the transfer will not cost much more.

Simply, the facilities at RMC were built many years ago in the early part of this century and were designed for a much larger armed forces. There is all kinds of room to centralize the three colleges at Kingston. We may have a slight problem in terms of dormitories, but we feel that can be arranged with some of the other facilities in and around the Kingston area perhaps by moving some of the senior students out into apartments. However, that will not be a great cost.

Comparing that cost with trying to centralize everything at Collége militaire royal de Saint-Jean, that would be prohibitive. We are in the business of trying to save taxpayers money, not just for people in Ontario but for people in Quebec and for all Canadians because this government governs on behalf of all Canadians from coast to coast.

[Francophones In The Armed Forces, February 25th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, there has been some discrepancy in the last few years because of the massive downsizing of the military put in place by the former government. It took $14 billion out of the budget from 1989 right through to 1997. We have added an additional $7 billion worth of cuts. Obviously there will be variations of the nature that the hon. member mentioned.

I want to tell the member that by 1997 anybody aspiring to the lieutenant-colonel rank of the military will have to be bilingual. That means we are putting on notice anglophones who want to be generals or chiefs of staff that they have to be totally and absolutely bilingual.

We have been improving the situation in the last few years. The college was opened in 1952 for the simple reason that, yes, there was a disparity in terms of the language preference of officers. However, because of the events of the last 25 years, the Official Languages Act and the appreciation in the rest of the country of the duality of Canada with respect to the French and English language and culture, there has been a great improvement. That improvement will continue even with the centralization in Kingston.

As for the last comment, I certainly agree with the right hon. Prime Minister because he had it bang on yesterday with what he said. He embarrassed those members. They will find it tough to go home on the weekend and face the people of Quebec after the blow that he dealt them yesterday.

[Francophones In The Armed Forces, February 25th, 1994]

This is not a report of the Department of National Defence; it is a political report directed by the former minister.

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member forgot to quote one thing.

He forgot to quote, again selective quotes, from the report. I will quote the first section dealing with the question of one of three colleges. The committee states that it believes that the one college system is the most likely alternative to the three college system. Does the member know why? It is because it is the

cheapest, the most effective and because of the facilities we have at Kingston. He conveniently forgot that.

[Francophones In The Armed Forces, February 25th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, first, this is a report of the former minister, Marcel Masse.

[Francophones In The Armed Forces, February 25th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member is quoting one former officer. Perhaps after this one-week recess, I will have found 20 or 30 former officers who disagree with the comments of the officer who was quoted yesterday and again today.

In other words, this is a typical case. I am not sick of the Bloc as individuals. Many of them are very nice. I am sick of their arguments. We have been listening for 25 years to these kinds of arguments. They can be selective. They can find one person to criticize this. I will find 30 who support us.

[Francophones In The Armed Forces, February 25th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member is discounting the changes that have taken place in Canada outside Quebec since the passage of the Official Languages Act twenty-five years ago.

There has been a great change in the rest of the country as a result of the passage of the Official Languages Act put forward by a Liberal government 25 years ago.

When the hon. gentleman starts inciting those comments and starts talking about Kingston, I would ask when the last time was that he went to Kingston, Ontario. Kingston, Ontario is a very sophisticated urban centre that is very sensitive to the duality of languages in this country.

I would invite him to go to RMC and see the French language instructors, see the French language students and ask them if they feel that Kingston, Ontario is inappropriate.

[Francophones In The Armed Forces, February 25th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, in the interview I gave to a Canadian Press reporter two days ago, I did not say that I was sick of Quebecers. What I said was that I was sick and tired of Quebecers like the Bloc Quebecois members sowing the seeds of dissension among Canadians during question period here in the House of Commons.

Mr. Speaker, in light of the cuts to our defence budget, we can either choose to keep all three colleges, even though we do not need this many institutions to train officers, or we can choose to centralize operations in one institution and Kingston's Royal Military College has the best facilities for this purpose.

I have been watching with some great alarm the remarks of people in Quebec, prodded by the members on the other side on this particular issue. They are not doing the people of Quebec and Canadians a great service by inflaming what is becoming an argument that is emotional and is not based in reality.

French is now taught at Kingston. Forty per cent of the students at Saint-Jean are in engineering. They have to finish their education in English and French at Kingston because it is too expensive to have two or three courses in engineering.

We already have in reality a bilingual college at Kingston. The facilities are much better. If the facilities had been better at CMR de Saint-Jean, we would have centralized everything there.