Mr. Speaker, I listened carefully to the previous speaker. He gave us a very eloquent overview of national defence. However, I do not fully agree with him, especially since he did not stick to the motion before us today.
As for the motion tabled this morning by the Minister of National Defence, I do not see the need to hold a special debate on our national defence policy, since the government has yet to table its white paper. With this debate, is the government playing for time and trying to bring the public on side? What I just said also goes for the cutbacks affecting military bases and for the peacekeeper training centres.
I was hoping the debate would focus mostly on ways to lower defence spending, even before the budget is tabled, rather than on a joint committee made up of a specific number of people, with specific terms of reference, which will undoubtedly cost Canadians an unknown amount of money. Earlier, the hon. member raised many questions, and I think that we have received enough information from our military strategists and our military staff and we have had enough discussions with these people to know where we should be going with our national defence policy.
I wonder of course how much this review will cost. I also wonder about the committee membership. I do not see why we need five senators on this committee, since they would only increase costs. But anyway, I am against such a committee.
In this debate on national defence, I have much more confidence in our military strategists. We have to trust someone, otherwise we should stop sitting in this House and start spending all our time consulting department after department. For example, CFB Bagotville is designed to be involved in Canada's territorial air defence, airspace control, drug enforcement, international forces as well as support for our land and naval forces.
CFB Bagotville can provide air defence since it already has all these elements. It can respond to all our anticipated needs in relation to NORAD. Bagotville is located 245 miles from Gagetown, 240 miles from Tracadie, 370 miles from Clearwater, 85 miles from Valcartier and 290 miles from Petawawa. Its central location makes it ideally suited to provide, with optimum efficiency, the services to which Canadians are entitled. The only thing that this base, which is 99.9 per cent francophone, needs to be really efficient is an air to ground weapons range.
I hope that the government will take these remarks into consideration and will take action instead of constantly telling us to wait, to wait for the creation of jobs, to wait for the budget. Communities that are concerned about base closures want to know. This is the question that I want to ask my colleague: How long they will have to wait before the government makes a decision. Will they have to wait one more year or even two more years? Will the government let this uncertainty drag on? If they knew that they were going to lose their base, they could start working right away with labour unions, with the industries that will be affected and with the people themselves in order to come up with a new project to replace that base. That is my question.