Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to move the following motion, which I gave notice of on October 2. I move:
That, pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), the committee undertake a study of the almost-one-billion dollar cuts to the Canadian Armed Forces and the impact this will have; that the committee hold a minimum of three meetings on the topic; that the committee invite the President of the Treasury Board, the Minister of National Defence, and the Chief of the Defence Staff to appear before the committee; and that the committee report its findings and recommendations to the House.
If I can just speak to that for a minute, as we know, it was announced that the government is going to find almost a billion dollars. The Liberals have asked the Department of National Defence to find those monies, and we had the chief of the defence staff here saying that this was going to have a very large impact on the operations of the Canadian Armed Forces. As he said at committee, he's had some “very difficult” conversations with the commanding officers of all three services—air force, army and navy—and they are having trouble communicating this back to their people. That's a direct quote.
I would say that, based upon the concerns that are being raised by the Canadian Armed Forces, based upon the efforts that are supposed to be made to get Canada to the NATO 2% metric, knowing that we just got a note this week that the public accounts have been tabled with Parliament and that last year the budget lapsed another $1.5 billion in defence spending and knowing that $2.5 billion lapsed in the previous year, a total of over $10 billion has now been cut from our Canadian Armed Forces and those dollars aren't being reinvested back in.
The government has always talked the game, but their actions speak louder than words, and I don't believe that Prime Minister Trudeau is at all interested in supporting our troops or making our Canadian Armed Forces more capable in light of the very dangerous world we live in, especially, as we saw in today's headline, with General Eyre talking about how Russia and China “consider themselves to be at war with the West” and that includes us as Canada. If we are under that level of threat—never mind what's going on in the Middle East with the war in Israel against the terrorist organization Hamas, and never mind our responsibilities to NATO on the eastern flank in Latvia and to help our allies in Ukraine—we need to make sure these cuts that the Liberals are bringing down on the Canadian Armed Forces are not undermining our ability and capability.