Thank you.
It's really perplexing to me as to why the NDP, Conservatives and Bloc would not want to help the men and women in the military by having the government respond to the recommendations that we come up with. Why would we have gone to all this work over months if the Conservatives, NDP and Bloc do not want the government to respond to our recommendations and improve the lives of the men and women in the forces and to show the victims that they were listened to? That is the purpose of my amendment.
Yvan Baker and I agree on an item: We came to Parliament to accomplish positive change, to improve Canada. MP Baker asked a very good question in a previous meeting: When we have all retired and we look back at this winter-spring session of Parliament of the defence committee, what then can we say we've accomplished?
Did we agree on many recommendations to help the thousands of victims existing or women existing in the military? No.
Did we do a thoughtful, lengthy debate and give recommendations on the complicated challenges of changing the culture? No.
Did we do a thoughtful, lengthy debate and give recommendations on a second major problem involved, the chain of command? No.
Did we do a lengthy debate and agree on recommendations on the third major problem, the fear of reprisals? No.
Did we help our soldiers around the world survive the terrible COVID pandemic that killed so many? Not yet.
Did we help so many of them afflicted with some...internally tortured with mental health afflictions? Not yet.
Did we help the navy procure needed warships? No.
Did our committee help the air force procure the next generation of needed warplanes? No.
Did we help keep our troops around the world safe? Did we help in Lithuania and Ukraine? No.
Did we address the Russian or Chinese military aggression? No.
Did our committee help make the world safer with our recommendations on peacekeeping? No.
Did we take into serious consideration the hundreds of emails and complaints and the hours of witness testimony or potential testimony to come up with the recommendations? No.
Did we modernize NORAD? No.
I'll tell you what the Conservatives, NDP and Bloc have accomplished. We've had week after week of witness after witness to fully investigate one anonymous email that the person didn't want public, so that no one knows what was in it. At one point, they even suggested recalling witnesses on that email. Since they have caused this endless stalling by refusing to co-operate for the good of the troops and by trying to force a motion through that would only allow two minutes of debate—the motion that we're talking about—on the serious topics related to improvement for our military.... In a subsequent submission, I'll go into how that just doesn't make sense.
In answer to Mr. Baker's question on what did we accomplish, the fact that the opposition parties are stalling week after week with their unreasonable motion doesn't mean that every member of the committee has accomplished nothing. In fact, a good researcher could do a chart on each member in the past few weeks, outlining how many times a member brought up valuable input from victims to the committee and got it on the record so that it could lead to improvements in the military, how many times a member brought on record input from experts that would help us design recommendations to help men and women in the military, how many times a member brought valuable input from other militaries that have found some solutions to the problems we are wrestling with, and how many times each member has raised constructive input on perhaps the biggest problem we are wrestling with: culture. How many times over the last few weeks has a member discussed the key major problems related to chain of command? How many times has a member discussed the threat of reprisals if a CAF member actually reports sexual misconduct?
In fact, that researcher could also rate the parties on how many times in the last few weeks they each made a positive contribution to those three major problems leading to sexual misconduct in the military: chain of command, fear of reprisals and culture.
I would be curious about the results of that research, but my gut reaction is that Mr. Spengemann and Mr. Baker have made the greatest number of positive contributions to the study by bringing most of the evidence related to those major issues to our committee.
It's not too late for all committee members to contribute. If the opposition parties would stop stalling the retraction of their unreasonable motion and have the government respond to the committee's work, which is what my amendment today deals with we could use various ways to move forward.
One was my suggestion that we quickly go through the recommendations that we can all agree on. I'm sure there would be a number of them. Then we could go into the more difficult ones that we couldn't agree on.
I'll leave it at that, Madam Chair. In my next intervention, I'll get more into the item of culture.
Thank you, Madam Chair.