Madam Speaker, I am very pleased to have an opportunity to address the House in this first day of the debate on the impact of budget 1994, especially as it concerns the Department of National Defence.
In the past few weeks it seems that every time we turn around there are defence issues facing us. We have had a debate on our peacekeeping mission in the former Yugoslavia. We have had a debate on the cruise missile test. We had a debate last week on the establishment of the special joint committee on defence review and there have been many questions in the House relating to some of those issues.
It is quite obvious that there is a great interest in defence policy in the country.
Why such great interest? Because the government intends to keep its election promises to Canadians, particularly the promise to review defence policy and to substantially reduce the national defence budget.
The time has come to fulfil our promises and that is what we are doing. That is why we have taken important steps to implement the economic program outlined in the red book. If I may, I would like to start with our economic program.
The government's number-one priority is to put the Canadian economy back on track. The government has expressed its intention to tackle the enormous federal deficit. At the same time, we must stimulate employment and economic growth. Our policy, based on these two requirements, translates into a program in two parts: one, job creation and economic recovery and two, decisive action to bring the debt and deficit under control.
In fiscal policy, our goals are quite ambitious but realistic. This distinguishes ourselves from the members of the Reform Party. As we have just heard from the member for Lethbridge, his party would like to put in place a deficit reduction regime that in our view would bring on an absolute economic depression in the country if the measures were put in place to reduce the deficit during the life of this Parliament as he and his colleagues are advocating.
Instead, our government intends to get the federal deficit down to something more realistic, 3 per cent of GDP during our first mandate. This will require very strict discipline in government spending in all departments. To stimulate growth in employment, which is the other side of this debate, and it seems the Reform Party forgets, we will be moving on several fronts.
For example, together with the provinces we have launched the public works program to renew elements of our national infrastructure. In the last election campaign the Liberal Party promised to cut defence spending by $1.6 billion over four years beginning April 1 of this year. Much of the money that we cut yesterday in the budget will have gone to the national infrastructure program.
While on the one hand we have been taking it from the defence end of expenditures, we have been recycling it and reinvesting it, if you will, in the public works infrastructure program which is now taking effect and which will have an impact on all parts of the country.
The hon. member for Lethbridge raises a very interesting point. I dealt with it last week, but I want to reiterate it. Why did we make the cuts that we made yesterday in the budget without first waiting for the results of the defence review? It is a genuine question and I will repeat the answer I gave last week.
In a perfect world we analyse our priorities, our policies and then we look at the money we have to implement those policies and put them into effect. We do not live in a perfect world. The fact is, and the hon. member for Lethbridge will agree, the debt situation is becoming quite alarming. The deficit has gone up astronomically. It is much larger than we believed when we first entered office. The Minister of Finance has made that point. As a result we had to act very quickly.
We acknowledged this before the last election campaign. I will not raise the red book. I do not have to raise it. It has become a benchmark for political discourse in the country and will go down as one of the great political documents of all time.
In the red book we outlined a regime to reduce defence spending, as I mentioned, $1.6 billion beginning April 1. We could not wait for a defence review. The mere setting up of the committee has taken time. Parliament only returned in January. We had to debate the motion. We were surprised that there was a recorded division forced by members of the Official Opposition on the motion. We voted on it this afternoon. They objected to the participation of the Senate although, to give them their due, they are willing to participate after they express their views against the Senate.
We are just getting the committee under way. The Minister of Finance had to act. He had to demonstrate to Canadians and to the financial markets that we knew where we were going in terms of the financial regime of the country. As a result these cuts had to go into effect now.
To preserve the integrity of the process upon which we voted this afternoon, I say to the hon. member for Lethbridge, we have cut the defence budget in such a way as not to impair what is known as the sharp end of defence. In other words we have taken the tough decisions. Members will see in the days ahead when the full impact of the budget becomes known that we have taken tough decisions in base closures and other installations. There are 21 closures and reductions altogether that other governments had failed to make.
For 10 years the Conservatives sat here in the biggest post-war economic boom and did not deal with the tough questions of surplus military infrastructures. They just sat on them and saddled Parliament with the consequences of their action, which is a deficit last year of $45 billion. They should be ashamed of themselves.
They paid the price in the last election. That is why there are only two of them sitting in the House. I am not so sure about the member for Saint John. She voted with us more than with the Conservative Party. Maybe she knows something the rest of the Canadian public figured out in the last election. The Conservative Party has been penalized, perhaps irrevocably, for what it has done to the country. The Conservatives should have taken these tough decisions and not left them to us.
It has been heart-wrenching and gut-wrenching for us on this side because most of the closures are in ridings represented by Liberal members of Parliament. It is pretty tough for them to go back home to Cornwallis, to Shelburne, to Gander or to Chatham. Even the Minister of Industry in Ottawa and those of us from Toronto find it tough. I see some colleagues here from Don Valley North, High Park and Rosedale; they are all here. We have to go back and say why 1,000 jobs are being left in Toronto. We are not dumping this on the opposition. We are taking the responsibilities the Tories should have taken in the last 10 years.
If we had not done that we would have had to have taken it out of the sharp end. We would have had planes that would not fly. We would have had lovely new frigates admired by many nations in the world, certainly by our American friends, that would not sail. They would not get off the Grand Banks because we would not be able to afford to operate them. We would have peacekeeping troops in Bosnia; luckily they do not have to shoot much, but we might very well have had to send them over there without bullets. I am being somewhat facetious, but we could not have continued our international commitments if we had taken out of the sharp end of the military budget at this time. We dealt with the tough questions.
When the review is complete we will have a military of which we can be proud. Even with these reductions the number of combat personnel in the army is going to go up about 2,500. We are reducing the number of uniformed personnel from the current 76,000 to 66,700 people. Yet we are adding, because of the economies we are making, 2,500 combat troops for future engagement. That is good management and I think Canadians will appreciate it.
Some people could ask: "Why are you cutting bases and throwing people out of work? Why don't you just cut capital expenditures?" I hate to say it but the former government of which I was a part in the early 1970s took that approach. We kept the capital expenditures low and the results were not very well appreciated by our NATO allies or certainly by our military. It is like anything else. If we let our cars run down and do not get them fixed, if we do not have our houses painted, at some point our past catches up and we have to repaint, buy new cars or spend a lot of money as I did this week on my car to get it running after this tough winter.
We did not cut the capital projects. Would hon. members want us to cut the armed personnel carriers now being constructed in London, Ontario, by General Motors? Our order has given the critical mass to produce and sell 800 armoured personnel cars to the U.S. marines and bring needed foreign exchange and jobs not only to southwestern Ontario but to other parts of the
country that contribute components. Do they want us to cancel that? I think not.
I said to some colleagues on the east coast: "Did you want us to cancel the coastal patrol vessel with nearly a billion dollar contract that will keep the Halifax shipyards working for the next few years?" This is work that can be built upon by other contractors and value added for the future. No.
I ask members of the Bloc Quebecois, the Official Opposition: Do they want that contract for the construction of a new supply depot in Montreal to be carried out?
We are going to build a state of the art supply centre in Montreal, in consitutencies represented by the Bloc Quebecois. We are not playing politics. We are thinking about the best interest of people in Quebec in this case.
Are they saying they want the 25 per cent reductions they bandied about to be taken out in this way, by cancelling a $270 million computer contract, much of which will be spent in the province of Quebec? Did they not want us to consolidate the supply mechanism in Edmonton and in Montreal? I would like answers to those questions.
While I am on the subject of the Official Opposition, I read a quote from question period that I liked so much I will read it again. Before doing so I will read a quote from yesterday's debate.
I quote the hon. member for Saint-Hyacinthe-Bagot, who just ended his speech and who said this in his reply to the budget speech yesterday in the House: "I have the feeling that this government is living on another planet, that it is not aware of Canada's excessive debt, which puts it in first place about everywhere in terms of poor performance".
They say we are living on another planet and ask whether we know about the debt. Then they sit here this afternoon and criticize us for the cuts that were made to the province of Quebec.
My friend over there, the critic, is a nice guy but this is what he said in the House of Commons on February 17.
I quote the hon. member for Charlesbourg: "In spite of it all, the defence infrastructure remains far too big for the size of the forces. With a strength of merely 78,000 members, the Canadian Armed Forces are maintaining from coast to coast facilities that could accommodate 140,000. Obviously, more cuts are needed, especially since several of our bases"-several of our bases, Madam Speaker-"are obsolete and increasingly expensive to maintain".
But not in Quebec. Oh no! Not in Quebec! Make cuts, but not in Quebec! That is what the Bloc Quebecois member is saying.
I continue to quote, Madam Speaker: "Also, their strategic value is not the same as it was at the time they were built. So, for all these reasons, the government will have to make a choice and impose a new round of closures". I just quoted the Official Opposition critic for National Defence and Foreign Affairs.
I will now quote the hon. member for Verchères, who said this during the same debate, on February 17: "During the last election, and many times since October 25, the Bloc Quebecois has reaffirmed its support for cuts in the budget of the Department of National Defence. Despite the international context I have just described, we believe that we could cut that budget by some 25 per cent without dramatically impairing the operations of that important department". That is what he said in the House, Madam Speaker.
If we cut the defence budget, as we did yesterday, there will be a decrease in the number of soldiers and officers in the army and other Canadian forces. That is why we do not need three military colleges. I want the hon. members over there to be honest and to acknowledge that we are not closing only the Collège militaire de Saint-Jean, in Quebec, but also the Royal Roads, in British Columbia. We are trying to be fair to the people in Quebec and to all Canadians.
