National Defence Committee on Oct. 26th, 2010

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

I too was going to refer to the quality of life report. It is incumbent upon our committee to go back and go to the list of recommendations and follow up and see how many of the recommendations have been enacted. They did it with quality of life, and we could be doing it with our post-traumatic stress disorder study, seeing how many of the recommendations....

The government isn't going to tell us what to do. We are the masters of our own committee, so we should initiate this process.

On the part that Jack mentioned, we had some wonderful witnesses from the northern community. It was interesting to listen to the grievances, but in terms of how they relate to the defence committee.... I couldn't see how it dovetailed with the aspect of defence and northern sovereignty.

So I'm not sure what it is Jack is hoping to see, from a defence standpoint, on the report from the government.

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

Thank you.

Mr. Wilfert.

[Bryon Wilfert, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Very briefly, Mr. Chairman, what I was trying to raise here is that the value of members of Parliament is often obviously underrated and in fact often devalued by some quarters. I think that if we are going to spend the time to do a report of this nature, we have a very good suggestion from Wolf about how we keep that in mind as we structure further reports in the future for those kinds of mechanisms.

I agree with Ms. Gallant that we should have a mechanism to establish whether the committee will say, okay, in six months, we want to know where you are. There are 17 recommendations here. I might suggest that there are one or two in particular that I think maybe we should go back to the government on, but beyond that, on the others, let's see where we are. What's the progress? What's the update on this? To ensure that we are accountable--we are accountable to those witnesses, we are accountable to the public--regardless of whether we're on that side or this side, we want to be able to say, yes, we accomplished something. We can look at it, as in the quality of life. I was around many years ago when that was done, and yes, we can look at that and say we did something. The only way to keep government accountable is obviously to have those kinds of mechanisms.

So I'd like to see that--not a make-work program--and at the same time.... You know, I'm not going to disagree with everything in here. I don't disagree with everything in here. But there are maybe one or two things where maybe either we weren't clear enough or we need to provide more information or the government needs to provide more clarification. So we could do that, but also for the future, that's what I'd like. That way I think it will make us all better at what we do.

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

Mr. Boughen.

[Ray Boughen, Conservative, Palliser, SK]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

If the report is going to be meaningful and have any chance of being implemented, I think we have to ask our writers to put a timeframe around it and devise an action plan. For example, on recommendation 12, it says:

The Committee recommends that the Government provide proper infrastructure such as shore facilities, mapping and mandatory ice-experienced pilots etc, in order to ensure the safe passage of transiting vessels through Canada’s Arctic waters.

Well, a lot of that is already under control through the coast guard. I think that needs to be said.

The people who wrote the report also wrote a response to the recommendations, and a lot of the responses are pretty straightforward. It seems to me that if we're going to implement the report, then we need a timeframe and we need an action plan on the report. Some of the implementation may simply be, as a committee, that we agree with the recommendation, because the recommendation, for all practical purposes, is already in place. That way, I think we ensure that the report then gets a little further involvement with people rather than just at the committee stage. It actually gets to be a working document.

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

Mr. Harris.

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

Thank you.

I would like to respond just briefly to Ms. Gallant's point, which I think is a fair question. I guess she's asking, “What's that got to do with the defence of the Arctic?”

We were doing a study on Arctic sovereignty, and the suggestion was made by the Inuit people that sovereignty is about the communities that are present in the Arctic and the best way to exercise your sovereignty is to have vibrant, self-sustaining, and engaged communities. It was in that context that the witnesses talked about the failure of the Canadian government to do the other half of the deal that was made in 1993: when we passed over our sovereignty that we had earned through our occupation from time immemorial, we gave that to the Government of Canada as part of this deal; the other part of the deal was that you were going to meet your obligations under the....

So it's all about sovereignty in the Arctic in making those commitments to those people. While it may not be defence à la guns and equipment, it's defence in the sense of sovereignty and how we achieve that. That's why it's important.

There were other important recommendations that we made that seem to be kind of ignored. We talked about an increased role for the coast guard and having mandatory ice-experienced pilots, so that we can have a presence in terms of managing the Northwest Passage. We had good evidence on that from witnesses.

All that stuff was essentially ignored by the government, who just said, well, here's what the coast guard is doing. That's nice, but that's not what we were talking about. We were talking about enhancing the services so that we could exercise sovereignty over the Northwest Passage. There are a number of areas where the government has failed to respond at all to those suggestions.

I'd be supportive of at least a general motion by the committee. I think there's not time to do it today and I didn't come prepared for that, but we've had this discussion, and if there's any interest by members of the committee to debate such a motion, perhaps we could have a generalized motion saying what our reaction to the government's response is, for the record. Whether it will make any difference or not....

I agree with Laurie; asking the same question, you're going to get the same answer. We can say we're not happy about the fact that they're not going to appoint an ambassador, and we'll get, “Well, we don't think we should”. That's not going to get us anywhere in terms of a response from the government. But as a committee, if the committee feels strongly that this response is not adequate to the evidence and the force of the report, then there's nothing wrong with this committee saying so in a type of omnibus motion, a motion that's crafted to include our critique of the response, or what's adequate or inadequate with it.

There are a lot of good things in this response, don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to just play opposition politics here. I'm just saying that there are several areas where I'm frankly disappointed that the government didn't take up the suggestions that were made with a lot of thought gone into them, and a lot of very professional and well-spoken individuals appearing before the committee.

That's all I can say.

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

Thank you.

Mr. Hawn.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

I don't disagree with the philosophy expressed, but the simple fact is that all those people, as good and well-meaning and sincere and so on as they are, don't have to deal with some of the realities that the government has to deal with. Some of that is reflected back in this report, which any government would do.

The committee is obviously free to disagree. That's what committees can do. The form it takes obviously is up to the committee. But I think a year down the road or whatever, for the things that are in here, it would make sense to go back and call whoever in to say, “Okay, what have we done; have we made progress here, here, and here, and if not, why not?”

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

Mr. Bachand.

[Claude Bachand, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

In terms of the progress, I would like to know what my colleagues think. In my view, if the government tells us there will be no Cabinet Committee on Arctic Affairs, even if I follow up in a month or two to inquire where things stand, I will be told that the government already gave its response: no. That is what will happen. I can of course do the rest, but I do not have any control over the contentious issues. As you said, yourself, you will say no once again.

There are other extremely significant issues. Earlier, I mentioned the strategy focusing on those who live north of the 60th parallel. The residents of Nunatsiavut and those living in northern Nunavik were politely excluded. I disagree with that. We asked that the position of Arctic ambassador be re-established, and there again, the answer was no. Of course, the government agrees to recommendations that affect minor issues, issues that are not far-reaching. But when it comes to issues we consider fundamental, the government says no. To my mind, a key recommendation was “That the government, in order to strengthen the [Arctic] Council, encourage it to broaden its mandate and make matters of security part of that mandate.” The government balked at the recommendation, responding that “When the Arctic Council was created in 1996, Arctic states explicitly stated that the mandate of the Arctic Council should not include matters of military security.”

The government can go ahead and use a treaty that dates back to 1867 to justify its response, but just because a decision was made in 1996, when the Arctic Council was created, that does not mean it is still valid. I do not know what the committee is going to do, but I intend to stand up publicly against certain points. That is my right. If the opposition had presented a united front, we would have been well-positioned to challenge the government. We could have told the government that it did not do its job on some of the key issues.

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

Mr. Hawn.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Everybody's free to write and say whatever they want, so largely it doesn't matter. Fundamentally the government makes decisions, and these decisions are all the purview of the government. If the government changes, if you take us down or whatever, fine, we have an election and somebody else is the government and they make their decisions, and we'll probably disagree with them, or whatever. That's part of the process: government is empowered to make decisions. This government has made decisions. Not everybody agrees with them. That's politics. That's fine. People can say and do whatever they like, but recognize the fact that government is empowered to respond to this and to make decisions, and that's what government has done.

This is not meant to be provocative, but ultimately the opposition will bring down this government and we'll have an election and folks will decide. That's fine. I don't think this is an issue you'd bring us down over, frankly, but fill your boots. I think you'd pick other ones, but.... I'm not making any suggestions.

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

Mr. Wilfert.

[Bryon Wilfert, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

I think our primary responsibility as parliamentarians is to ensure we have a process, since we are masters of our own fate in terms of committee, that we establish regardless of what anybody else does, that empowers the members, that holds government accountable, that does have a mechanism in place for follow-up, and also provides rationale as to what we are doing. If stakeholders come back and ask what happened, why the recommendation was....

I've been on the other side. I agree with Laurie that, yes, governments do have to make decisions. But at some point we also, as the opposition, may say, “Here is the recommendation we think is really important, it came across unclear, and we want to highlight it”. As to how you highlight it, I guess you can do it any way you like. But I think we need to particularly look, as we go forward, to deal with the kinds of discussions in which we frame it so that we ourselves get better value out of this in the end.

If some of us got together and said “Here's a recommendation that we think....” You can't say everything is bad. We'd say, “This is really critical, and we think we may want to highlight it in a different way”. And that's fine; you may even agree with us, presumably, because you're all part of this study. At the end of the day, I don't drive my car looking in the rear-view mirror all the time either, but I do like to think that we can maybe get some suggestions written out; maybe if Wolf could come back and say, well, here, this would be helpful...and also helpful to you in terms of how we frame it in the future, because we're going to do more of these, presumably.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

There should be some general method of--

[Bryon Wilfert, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Yes, a methodology that will help us.

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

Mr. Harris.

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

I just have a few comments on the general discussion. May I suggest a road map? There is a road map, by the way. You simply report something to the House and then we have a concurrence debate on that report. If there's something that is particularly vital that we need to have debate on in the House, there are easy mechanisms to do that.

I'm just a little puzzled by our discussion here. What we're kind of saying is the government won't do what the committee asked them to do.

So I'm agreeing with you, Bryon; if there's something that we're really concerned about, if someone wants to move a motion that we report something to the House and we have a debate on it, as Mr. Hawn says, fill your boots. There are ways within Parliament to do it. If there are better ways, let me know. A motion by this committee that puts something on the record is fine, and a debate in the House of Commons is another way of doing it.

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

Mr. Hawn.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

You can do what you like. I mean, the report is the report. You can have a concurrence motion or whatever you want. There are mechanisms to do that. But beyond that, to Bryon's point, I think we should have a general process that allows some follow-up to whatever committee reports we do and whatever reports come back from the government. That's maybe a different thing.

Anyway, I think we're done.

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

Wolf, do you want to add something?

[Wolfgang Koerner]

No, no.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Wolfgang Koerner]

We'll give it a better shot next time and see where we go.