Mr. Speaker, I have waited a long time, probably close to five years, for a debate like this to take place in the House of Commons.
I was first elected in 1988. It should be fairly clear to anybody who has been to or lived in Nova Scotia and knows anything about national defence that the contributions made by the Canadian Armed Forces in Nova Scotia and indeed all of Atlantic Canada are extreme not just in dollars spent but also in contributions to communities.
When I was growing up, when we would see somebody in uniform on the main street of my home town, including my father who had served in the armed forces during the second world war, we would look to these people with a great deal of respect. It was bred into us. Of all the places in this great country, I believe there is no place where a service man or woman would feel more welcome than in a place like Nova Scotia because today we still harbour the same degree of respect for the men and women in uniform that we did during the Second World War and in times since then.
Places like Nova Scotia have benefited greatly financially because of the contributions and placement of bases of the Canadian Armed Forces. It is important when talking about the motion in front of us that we look at this from a bit of a historical perspective.
CFB Shearwater and probably half the Canadian navy on the east coast are in my riding. When I was elected in 1988, one of the big concerns that I heard over and over again was that these people in uniform who chose to serve their country so proudly and so well felt that once their representatives were elected, they forgot that they too were constituents who needed to be heard.
They were fed up in 1988 with what they saw as a series of government initiatives that clearly did not care what the job was that they were asked to do, that clearly were not policy driven. They seemed to be driven by an imperative first to get elected. Therefore they promised anything. However, once they were elected, they said they had a debt, a deficit and other things to consider. These were tough decisions. Guess who got the biggest cuts every time something came around? It was the men and women in the Canadian Armed Forces.
Somebody may ask why that is. Perhaps one of the reasons is that when one becomes a member of the Canadian forces and is a good soldier, seaman, air force pilot or working on the Sea King helicopters, one gives up many of the fundamental rights that every other Canadian has come to expect. One gives up one's right to publicly criticize government policy.
Many men and women in the Canadian Armed Forces immediately become an easy target for indiscriminate non-policy based cutting in the area that they have chosen to make a living, national defence.
In 1988, it was tough for me to canvass. When knocking on doors in Dartmouth, career naval officers said to me that my party was against the nuclear submarine program. How can you say your government will look after the interest of the Canadian military establishment, the defence industry establishment and indeed the interest of Canada as a sovereign state if you do not support this initiative?
I said to them that I believed the Canadian Armed Forces had to be given the tools to do the job that they were mandated to do. First and foremost, before we went into these major expenditures we had to have a defence review. We needed to have a white paper that had some teeth, that took into account the fact that the world had changed dramatically since any government had made a fundamental policy review in national defence.
People said to me at the time that Mr. Beatty, then Minister of National Defence, had a paper that went to the floor of the House of Commons. I told them that he had not acted on it, that we were still talking about it. They said that nevertheless it was a paper. I had a heck of a hard time convincing those individuals that the Liberal Party was committed to having a fundamental review of defence policy and that we would modernize our national defences for a changing world. I suppose a lot of them did not vote for me.
About six months after that when the Conservatives were re-elected in 1988, all their plans, policies and great promises of what they were going to do for the Canadian military establishment got shuffled away because of the debt and deficit. All of a sudden Mr. Beatty's white paper on defence was shredded. Once again we had a haphazard approach on how to deal with Canada's national defence forces.
In 1989 when the budget was brought in, after many men and women in the Canadian Armed Forces voted for the Conservative Party, voted for that government because they believed what had been said in the pre-shredded document of 1987 white paper, the Tories came in in 1989 and cut nearly $3 billion, $2.75 billion, from national defence over four years. They did this without any review of the impact that would have on the role that we asked the men and women in the Canadian Armed Forces to perform for us as Canadians both domestically and internationally.
We also saw base closures, again without a fundamental review. What is it that you want the men and women in the forces to do? Tell the generals and they will do their best. Do not come in and say: "We want you to do exactly the same today as you did yesterday, and by the way we are going to send you to three or four more peacekeeping hot spots in the world, but you are going to have to do it with $2 billion, or $3 billion, or $5 billion, or $7 billion less".
It was ridiculous. It was impossible to do both things at the same time. However the military did their best. Then we had what I consider to be an attack on regional realities in Canada.
Because the Tory government did not have a lot of seats in Atlantic Canada, it decided in the 1989 defence cuts that we would share a greater burden of defence cuts than any other part of the country. With 22 per cent of the personnel of the Canadian Armed Forces in Atlantic Canada, we received 55 per cent of the cuts in that 1989 budget. Forget what the mandate was. Forget what those bases were doing. Forget how that would impact on the ability of the Canadian Armed Forces to do their job. It was cut. A political decision was made to cut in Atlantic Canada because the Tories had very few seats there.
The Tories were not going to look anywhere else and we lost bases. We lost CFS Sydney, CFS Barrington, CFB Summerside. I still cannot believe that one. We had reductions in Gander, in Chatham, New Brunswick and on top of all that CFB Moncton, our supply base. I have talked to the generals who say it makes sense to have CFB Moncton, it makes sense to have CFB Chatham.
Political decisions were made at that point in time. The best advice of the generals was thrown aside. That government which had a lot of seats in one province, the province of Quebec, made some decisions about where supply bases should go. That is what it did.
It is little wonder that the men and women in the Canadian Armed Forces started to view all of us that practise politics in this place with a little bit of suspicion. They had been fooled once more.
The other thing that we saw in subsequent budgets was about $11 billion cut over the long term from national defence expenditures in Canada, all without a policy in place. Each and every time the government mismanaged its financial dossier, it hit national defence for the reason I said earlier. The men and women in national defence really do not have a voice. They are not allowed to speak up. They give up that fundamental right that every Canadian comes to expect because they have chosen to serve their country.
We are once again faced with the big bogeymen of the national deficit and debt. Where is government most likely to look first for cuts? National Defence. I have done my homework. I have done my research. I have come to a conclusion. We have a major debt problem in this country. We have got a deficit problem.
The one area of expenditure that has not contributed in any great way to the debt and deficit of this country is national defence. Since the mid-fifties we have seen the expenditures on national defence, not rise like in almost every other area of expenditure but go down steadily from about 25 per cent to about 7 per cent. We have seen the standing forces of the Canadian Armed Forces almost halved in the last 10 years.
National defence, I understand, is a big budgetary expenditure item. I am not saying that it is not. I think that in the absence of a fundamental wholesale full policy review that any further cuts to the Canadian military at this point in time would not only be stupid, would not only be dangerous but would be disastrous for the capability that we may be asking for in 12 months or 14 months' time, that the men and women and their generals and planners undertake for the Canadian Armed Forces.
I want to debunk another myth because some of it is coming from this side of the House and that is kind of hard for me to take. There is a myth that somehow when governments need to cut that we do not look at the strategic reasons why bases are in certain places but we say: "Well, we have to somehow equal pain". As an Atlantic Canadian who has been here for five years, when I hear equal pain it usually means more pain down in my neck of the woods than anywhere else. I hear this coming from some people in the department and some people in the government and it scares me.
Somebody said to me the other day: "Well, you know, Ron, you have $1,240 per capita being spent in Nova Scotia on national defence and the average is about $388 or $389 nationally. So I guess you can take a bigger hit than anybody else". The last time I checked, Canada had one of the longest coastlines of any state in the world. Of all the provinces in Canada, I would
put forward that when we take all of those coves on that craggy shore of Nova Scotia together, we probably have the longest coastline of any province in Canada.
The last time I checked, a sovereign state that had a navy had to put it on the coasts. It does not put it on the prairies. It does not put it in central Canada. I suppose it could try to put it on the Great Lakes but it might have trouble getting out sometimes. The last time I checked, if you are a maritime state, you have to put your navies on your coastline. We have the largest coastline of any state in the world. Nova Scotia has the largest coastline of any province.
British Columbia is on our Pacific side. Where do we put our navies? We put them on our coasts. That is why Victoria, Esquimalt and Halifax harbour are the homes to Canada's navy.
Yes, it costs to have a navy. It costs about a billion dollars per coast to have that small, paltry navy that probably needs a lot more equipment than what it has, but it does a damn good job with the equipment that we have given them and the resources.
I am not going to apologize and say because Halifax is the best ice-free Canadian port on the east coast of Canada that somehow we should shut everything else down in Atlantic Canada that has to do with the military because we have the navy. I am not going to do that because it does not make any strategic sense. The argument is full of vile subtleties that I am not going to debate in this place.
If we take out the Canadian navy and its contribution in Atlantic Canada, suddenly Atlantic Canada and all of the other defence establishment expenditures are below the national average. Is that not shocking? The member for Chatham knows that. I look at the member from Summerside and he knows that. However, past governments have said: "Well you have more than the rest, therefore you have to suffer a little more". Well, we have suffered quite enough from poor planning on defence strategy and poor economic planning of the last government. I am hoping that my government today is not going to do the same thing.
One thing I do know is that we do have a surplus of infrastructure in the Canadian Armed Forces. I know that. That is fundamental. It is reality. What I do know is that when planners over at finance start to determine what they think is sound infrastructure for defence then our defence policy hits the shoals. I know that defence planners are no more capable of dealing with science and technology planning perhaps or the post-secondary educational area in Canada than finance planners would be in defence.
That is why we need first-and I underline first-and foremost a fundamental review of what it is that we want our Canadian Armed Forces to do. Do up the list, priorize it, put our expenditure lines down, tell us how much it will cost and then sit down as a government and determine which of those priority options we are going to undertake.
I think to go the opposite direction would allow us to fall into the same trap as the previous Conservative government. It would allow the state of our Canadian Armed Forces to further erode to a point perhaps from which they will not easily be able to return.
It was not easy in this election to be canvassing with our red book. I supported the red book but it was not easy. The red book said that if we became government we would cancel the EH-101 helicopter contract.
CFB Shearwater is in my riding. It employs a lot of people and does a tremendous job for Canadians. There is the navy at Halifax harbour. Therefore, it was not easy for me to tell people at national defence that I supported new helicopters but I did not support that acquisition. I did it because I believed in the larger policy that we put forward as a government.
I said it before and will say it again to put it in Hansard that as long as we have the Canadian navy on both coasts, it is going to need shipborne air support. As long as we have ships and a navy and we need air support we are going to have to have good equipment to send our pilots up in.
The Sea King helicopters currently at CFB Shearwater are old. They are aging. We have great maintenance crews to keep them flying but they are still old and aging. This or some other government is going to have to make a decision on replacement because those helicopters must be replaced.
The argument then is as to whether or not the choice of the previous government was indeed a sane one. I do not think it was. It was a helicopter based on the premise of an old white paper in the absence of any modern defence policy saying that what we needed was a cold war helicopter. I know it does other things but essentially it was a cold war helicopter.
What I said to the people in my riding was that if they elected me as part of a Liberal government I would ensure there was a voice for the Canadian Armed Forces in my caucus and on the floor of the House of Commons. I would ensure there was a fundamental review of defence policy. I would ensure when that defence policy review was completed that somebody would be there to fight for the resources for the men and women of the Canadian Armed Forces to do the job we ask of them, which they do so willingly and so proudly on behalf of each and every one of us.
We are at that point now. I have read the red book. I had a little bit of say in how it was put together as some of us on this side did. We knew there would be cuts to national defence, but we said two things. We said we would fund the infrastructure program in the red book through cuts to the existing programs and we identified national defence as one of those departments.
We said we would take $360 million from national defence. We also said we would not take it in the same manner the previous Tory administration had, but that we would take it after consultation. I underline after. We indicated that any further cuts in national defence would flow from this fundamental policy review for defence.
I hope that on Tuesday we find that those commitments we made and that I and every one of us canvassed on are upheld in the budget.
Nobody in the Canadian Armed Forces I have met thinks times are easy. They know times are tough because they are taxpayers too. They know that the debt and deficit are spiralling out of control. However they also know that government has a responsibility to maintain a defence force.
What are the things I would like to see in the review? First and foremost we have to look at what our domestic requirement is. There is the navy on the east coast of Canada. We send those frigates and supply vessels out. We send them on exercises in the north and south Atlantic. It costs a lot of money to do that, but as long as we are involved in things like NATO then that is part of our commitment.
I hope that the defence review looks at what is the best and most efficient use of the limited naval resource we have on both coasts first and foremost looking at what it is we need as a sovereign state.
I have mentioned four or five times that we have the largest coastline in the world. I do not have to remind any Canadian that we have a major crisis in the Atlantic fishery. We cannot even police our own 200-mile limit. We have had a problem with too many Canadian fishermen taking too many fish because we could not watch them. We have had a problem with too many foreigners coming in and taking too many fish. Because we could not even police our own sovereign fish resource on the east coast the result is that we have about 40,000 people out of work down there.
We have seen an ecological catastrophe of biblical proportions with the virtual elimination of the northern cod stock. Surely to goodness we have learned our lesson and the defence review will look very closely at what it is we can do with our naval resources to ensure that our renewable fishery resource and which has employed so many hundreds of thousands of Canadians over the centuries is protected once those cod stocks return. That is a role we can look at.
There is another thing we have to look at. There is another war going on in our waters. That is the illegal drugs which are going into far too many coves, nooks and crannies, all along the east and west coasts of Canada. It is destroying our young people. Surely to goodness one of the things we must do is look at our defence resources and apply them in such a way that we combat this crime wave.
I hope we also look at the defence forces for other things. Domestic security also includes environmental security in this day and age. I do not know why we could not use the expertise of the men and women in the Canadian Armed Forces to have a first and ready strike force. Any time there is an environmental or ecological disaster in Canada these highly trained individuals could go in and secure the area and mitigate against environmental catastrophes as much as possible for Canadians.
On the international scene we are going to have to fish or cut bait. We cannot have it both ways. We are a small nation of around 28 million souls. We do our very best. Canada has participated in every peacekeeping venture since the second world war. Think about it. We are spending over $1 billion in our efforts in Bosnia at a time when the government has a $45 billion deficit and we are talking about cutbacks to programs and transfers to individuals.
These are not easy times for us. However surely the defence review will look at these things and will look at what it is we want our armed forces to do in domestic security. It will also look at what we should be contributing as part of our international collective responsibility. Maybe it is peacekeeping. Maybe we will decide there are other things we should do.
What I do know is that the framework established in the red book must be completed. This defence review we are debating today is absolutely essential and has been far too long in the offing. I am very pleased one of the first things our government has done is to choose to set this committee up as quickly as possible so it can go out and consult and come back with the framework for a modern policy for the Canadian Armed Forces.
I am no seer; I do not have a crystal ball. However I hope that on Tuesday the actions the Minister of Finance must take in order to try to control our spiralling debt and deficit will not adversely affect or prejudice this review. I hope the Minister of Finance and the Minister of National Defence will be able to effect as much of the savings as they must for this current year internally, without laying waste too much of the infrastructure of the Canadian Armed Forces.
In conclusion, this has been a great debate and I look forward to participating further as the day rolls on. The men and women of the Canadian Armed Forces have waited a long time for a government that lives up to its commitments on defence. They will be proud and pleased this defence review is now finally under way. At its conclusion they will find that yes, democracy
does work and that yes, sometimes political parties and prime ministers do keep their word to the men and women of the Canadian Armed Forces.
