Mr. Speaker, the hon. member had a number of questions but I think the focus was why we need to have this committee. I have to presume he means the combined committee because I do not believe the hon. member would object to the defence standing committee studying the defence issue. I am going to assume he meant the combined committee.
I am not sure where the Bloc is coming from because I sat in this House a week or 10 days ago while the Bloc argued for a committee to look at issues the Auditor General had raised. On the one hand it wants some committees. On the other hand it now objects to the fact that a committee is struck for a substantive purpose, that is to look at what it is we are doing in defence.
The hon. member asks why we do not just apply the red book. That is precisely what we are doing. We are applying the red book. The red book says we are going to have a defence policy review by the end of the year. That is what we are doing. It should be no surprise.
The hon. member talks about preparation time. My gosh, people with the backgrounds they have should not need much time to prepare on such an issue as defence policy. God knows members spoke about it enough during the election so they should have enough preparation time to talk on the general subject. This is not a specific issue. Any member can get up and talk about anything on defence related to a defence review. I am not sympathetic to that problem quite frankly.
I will address the substantive issue. The substantive issue the hon. member has put to me is how the parliamentary secretary and the minister can support a combined committee. I will give him the answer; it is not that complex.
In the bad old days the traditional method I talked about in defence planning was relatively simple in the sense of how it was done. We asked: Who is our enemy? We looked across the ocean or up in the sky and we identified a potential enemy. Once we identified the enemy, we asked: Okay, what are his capabilities? There are satellites now that can hover 200 miles above and can read not only the licence plate number on a car but also can give the pigment in the paint. We knew more or less what the enemy had. We had the enemy identified and the enemy's capability.
The third aspect was: What is the intention of that enemy? Does he intend to surprise us by lobbing ballistic missiles? Does he intend to have a landing force in the Arctic? What are his intentions?
Determining intentions was more difficult than determining the capability or identifying the enemy. If a country had more armed forces than it justifiably and reasonably needed to defend itself, then it could be concluded it had an intention other than its defence. It had an offensive intention. Depending on how much excess defence capability it had could determine more or less how aggressive those intentions could be.
We cannot identify the enemy now. Therefore we do not know what his intentions are and we do not know his capabilities. When faced with that kind of situation as we are now that the cold war is over, we tend to fumble and do not know how to go about it.
However, what we are faced with, as many members in this House know, is the sitting down of reasonable men and women to take a look at a situation that is peppered with uncertainty. In a case like this the more people within the confines of an institution, in this case the parliamentary institution, we bring to bear, the better our judgment is likely to be.
In bringing two sides of the House together we not only get the perspective of members of the House of Commons, a certain age group, a certain philosophy and a certain commitment because of their requirement to campaign and be re-elected, we bring into call the upper chamber, the other place, which brings another dimension to those factors I mentioned.
The salaries are there anyway. On the cost of travelling, the numbers of dollars are so marginal as to be almost inconsequential.