Randall Garrison

[Business of Supply, May 15th, 2019]

Madam Chair, while the minister says he is responding to the UN request, the UN sent a letter asking Canada to extend its mission to September 31. The UN made a very specific request. Therefore, if he is trying to say what he is doing is what the UN is asking us to do, then the way to do that is to say yes and extend that mission. Everyone we met there, the serving troops, said that if they are allowed or asked to do this, they can make this work. Why is the minister sticking to his very stubborn deadline that will leave a gap in these very important services?

[Business of Supply, May 15th, 2019]

Madam Chair, of course that is not an increase in operating expenditures. That is an increase in capital expenditures and an increase in new projects. Therefore, my point still remains the same, that for the everyday jobs that people in the Canadian military have to do, there is not actually more money there. When it comes to things like the aging infrastructure of bases and the everyday maintenance tasks they have to do, there is less and less money available every year to do those.

I want to turn to the question of Mali, since the minister raised that in his remarks. I was fortunate to be part of the defence committee that visited Mali earlier this year. What we saw was what the minister talked about, the excellent work in medical evacuations that is being done by the Canadian Forces in Mali. However, it became very clear to us that Canada has made a decision to leave before our replacement in medevac services is available, so we are going to leave a gap from August 1 until October 15 when medevac services will not be available to the UN mission in Mali.

What we heard very clearly on the ground is that the work we do supports the MINUSMA forces. It is a stabilization mission. They are defending schools, hospitals, the food aid distribution system, aid workers and places of religious worship. They are trying to stabilize the country and prevent the terrorists from causing the collapse of the state of Mali. Therefore, when we remove our medevac services, what the UN forces told us is that it means that without air medevac they have to reduce the scope of their operations. Right now, they can operate 200 to 300 kilometres from their bases. When there are no medevac services like the ones we are providing, they will have to scale down to 20 to 30 kilometres.

While the minister talked about ISIS forces not occupying territory in Syria, we have had recent reports that they are trying to occupy territory in the Sahel. If we force the UN to draw down its operations, we will be partially responsible if ISIS forces manage to seize territory there.

Why is the minister refusing the UN request to extend the mission by just a few weeks so there is no large gap between us and the Romanians?

[Business of Supply, May 15th, 2019]

Madam Chair, I simply do not understand what it is the minister thinks we need to work on jointly. We have the support of the Conservatives. We have the support of almost all other members in the House. We had the support, apparently, of Liberal members at the committee until the minister intervened.

I will be, as I said, asking for unanimous consent at some point. I hope the minister rethinks his inexplicable opposition to taking this very positive step.

I want to turn to the question of spending, since this is an estimates debate. The minister threw around a number, which I know he likes very much, because I have heard it so many times, and that is that the Liberals are going to increase military spending by 70%. He likes these large numbers, and he likes talking about the future, but when we actually look at this year's estimates, what do we actually find if we look at operating expenses for DND? We find that the Liberals are the same as the Conservatives. They are asking more and more of the Canadian Armed Forces each and every year without a real increase in operating expenditures.

If we look at the increase from the 2017-18 main estimates to 2018-19, the increase was 1%. If we look at it from 2018-19 to 2019-20, there is a big increase of 1.3%. How does the minister think the Canadian military can continue to do the excellent job it does when he is giving it increases below the rate of inflation? How is the military going to continue serving the country so well with less and less money every year?

[Business of Supply, May 15th, 2019]

Madam Chair, I do not understand what the minister wants to study. We already heard the witnesses at committee, including mental health experts. We heard from the families who have lost loved ones to death by suicide. There is nothing to study here.

We know that the existence of this section of the National Defence Act is a barrier to people getting the treatment they need. We know that it is both a symbolic barrier and sometimes a practical barrier, as people are assigned minor discipline for attempts to take their own lives. How is this helpful?

I have rewritten my amendment into a private member's bill, Bill C-426, and I will be asking for the unanimous consent of the House to pass that bill in all its stages.

I ask the minister once again, what is he waiting for, when we all know that this would be a major step forward, both symbolically and practically, in addressing this crisis within the Canadian Armed Forces?

[Business of Supply, May 15th, 2019]

Madam Chair, I will begin with some brief remarks, but I want to spend the majority of my time on questions to the minister.

We all know that we ask the women and men of the Canadian Armed Forces to do difficult and dangerous work on our behalf each and every day, at home and abroad. As parliamentarians, we have a responsibility to make sure that they receive the training, equipment and support they need, both while they are serving and as veterans. Therefore, tonight, whether we are talking about actual dollars of spending, procurement or deployment, we have to make sure that we keep the serving members and their families central to what we are talking about here tonight.

The Canadian Armed Forces faces many challenges, as we all know, with recruitment and retention. Meeting those challenges is essential to make sure that the Canadian Armed Forces reflects the faces of our nation. Certainly the Canadian Armed Forces and DND have much work to do when it comes to dealing with some key issues, such as sexual assault within the military and mental health issues. This is both a matter of justice and a matter of how we are investing in those who serve their country, and it is a necessity if we are ever to meet those diversity goals.

As members will know, one of my concerns has been how the Canadian Armed Forces has been dealing with mental health issues. I acknowledge that there has been some progress made. However, I still have a large concern about death by suicide within the Canadian Armed Forces. We are still losing one serving member a month to death by suicide. That is over 160 members since 2005. It is a tragedy for all those families, and it is a tragedy for our country. That number does not even include reservists, because, unfortunately, we do not even keep good statistics on death by suicide of reservists, and of course, it does not count veterans who may be suffering from PTSD.

While there has been progress in acknowledging that not all injuries within the military are visible, we still have much more to do. We had one very big opportunity to do something in this area earlier this year. When we were talking about Bill C-77, the military justice reform bill, I proposed an amendment to remove self-harm as a disciplinary offence in the Canadian military code of conduct.

We held hearings and we heard from witnesses, such as Sheila Fynes, who lost a son to death by suicide while he was serving. We heard from experts on mental health. We heard from senior members of the Canadian Armed Forces. We had indications from a majority of committee members that they would support my amendment. I want to thank the Conservatives for their early support in trying to remove this barrier to treatment of mental health issues that is both symbolic and practical.

However, 30 minutes before we were to vote in committee on my amendment to remove self-harm as a disciplinary offence, the minister sent an email to every member of the committee asking us not to do this. The Liberals then voted against my amendment, saying it was out of order in a military justice reform bill, which is passing strange, since this is a bill that was already amending the code of conduct in several other places.

I have a very direct question for the minister. Why did the minister ask the committee not to remove this barrier to the treatment of mental health issues and to this very severe problem we have with death by suicide in the military? Why did the minister ask committee members not to remove subsection 98(c) of the military code of conduct?

[Petitions, May 15th, 2019]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to present petitions containing the signatures of literally hundreds of British Columbians, who urge the Government of Canada to commit to acknowledging that eye heath and vision care are a growing public health issue, particularly among Canada's most vulnerable populations, children, seniors, indigenous people and those with diabetes. They want the government to do this through establishing a national framework for action to promote eye health and vision care.

[The Environment, May 13th, 2019]

Mr. Speaker, the southern resident killer whales are under immediate threat of extinction, yet the Liberal government's recovery plan lacks urgency and fails to take on the major threat to these orcas: oil tankers and freighters. While the government has banned local small craft from the Swiftsure Bank, the most critical piece of habitat for the orcas, it will continue to allow more than 13,000 freighters and oil tankers to transit the bank each year. That makes no sense. In order to protect these endangered orcas, will the government act immediately to realign the commercial shipping lanes and move the major noise and pollution threats away from the Swiftsure Bank?

[Criminal Code, May 8th, 2019]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for Cowichan—Malahat—Langford for his work on this issue. I also thank him for his work on reconciliation in his community over some things that happened around animal cruelty issues.

When we talk about a glacial pace, let me just say this. We voted on the private member's bill put forward by the member for Beaches—East York on October 5, 2016. Therefore, if somebody is worried about how fast or how slow we have gone, we could have finished with this issue in a much better bill than the one before us today had the government not killed its own backbench private member's bill.

It is not a question of somebody delaying this legislation except for government members.

[Criminal Code, May 8th, 2019]

Mr. Speaker, I am not going to thank the member for that question, because when it comes to disingenuous, he is the poster boy for disingenuous. If we looked in a dictionary, we would find his picture under the word “disingenuous”. Nobody did anything today, or any other day, on the opposition side to delay this bill. The only thing I agree with in his question is the credit he gave, which I neglected to give adequately, to the animal rights activists who also pushed the government to move the bill forward.

[Criminal Code, May 8th, 2019]

Mr. Speaker, I want to again thank the member for Calgary Nose Hill for her advocacy on this issue. What I said in my speech I really think is a credit to her. She has been the leader in pointing out in this House that there is no necessary connection between improving animal protection and the way we treat animals and some of the fears that have been stirred up by the other side that this would somehow affect aboriginal rights or the rights of farmers to farm or that it would do away with the Calgary Stampede. None of those would be the case. None of those would ever have to be the case.

What the bill is aimed at are particularly egregious abuses of animals in our society. For me, the worst is animal fighting. We do not have good statistics on animal fighting, but we all know that it goes on. We do not have the proper tools to attack those abusive practices. This is not aimed at farmers. It is not aimed at exhibitions. It is not aimed at aboriginal people.