Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
I welcome you from the pre-dawn darkness of Victoria on the west coast.
I'd like to make four or five observations by way of scene-setting.
I applaud the government's decision to incorporate the Coast Guard within DND. My colleague, Mr. Henderson, has articulated elegantly the value of that integration. It is, in my estimation, very long overdue indeed. It's a blindingly obvious symbiotic relationship between two maritime organizations desperately in need of greater financial support and attention. It's a case, I think, of the sum being much more than the whole of the parts. We have a Coast Guard fleet larger numerically than the major elements of the Royal Canadian Navy, and one that has an acute and intimate understanding of our great northern flank.
It was back in 1957 that HMCS Labrador, the Arctic patrol ship of the Royal Canadian Navy, last transited the Arctic. More recently, of course, as you are well aware, the Arctic and offshore patrol ships have operated in the area, but they are in many ways woefully inadequate in terms of the equipment they carry on board.
I think there has been, over the years, an abject failure on the part of successive governments to honour the principal responsibility they have—that is to say, to provide defence and security for the nation. What makes their conduct even more criminal—and I use that word with some care—is that they were fully aware of the inadequacy of the preparations involved with respect to the Canadian Armed Forces and, in this setting, with respect to the Canadian Coast Guard.
There was an element of complacency and naïveté, which we are now obliged to address. For years, we were, to put it frankly, a nation of sleepwalkers in terms of the larger security dimension. We live, ladies and gentlemen, in what is self-evidently a dangerous and difficult and different world, and our opponents are brutal. They are intent and they will give us no quarter in the final analysis. We have become accustomed, rightly, to operating according to rules of law and to principles of warfare, and these are, for the most part, irrelevant to our principal competitors. They march to a different drum, and we need to be fully aware of that fact.
We are, in a word, at war. I don't say that unnecessarily and I don't say that provocatively, but when you look at the steady deterioration of the international geostrategic environment, what you see in sabotage, in interference operations, in grey zone activities threatens the very integrity of Canada, and we would be, I think, naive indeed if we failed to appreciate that and prepare accordingly.
What I would leave you with is one word: urgency. This, in my estimation, in reviewing the activities in the defence and security realm over the past 25 years, has been woefully absent. Time is not on our side, and we face a resolute and, in many ways, enormous competitor. We have, for example, only to look at the China Coast Guard, which has 225 ships, including two 10,000-tonne vessels, larger than anything in the Royal Canadian Navy. This is a force that is not benign, like our Coast Guard, but one that is used in a paramilitary role to advance China's interests. We have Russia with 41 icebreakers, a situation that will be impossible to replicate without decades of endeavour on our part.
This is a deeply serious state of affairs. We can no longer be laggards. We must act with immediate resolve.
The union of the Coast Guard and the navy in an operational context is an enormously important and positive step in terms of enhancing the ability of both services to increase our sensory capacity and to expand our knowledge, particularly in the high north.
Thank you very much.