Mr. Speaker, listening to my hon. colleague, I hear a lot of things I never said. First of all, I would like to say that I went out of my way to point out that such a debate was highly desirable, and highly praiseworthy, but that we cannot have a discussion just for the sake of it. To have any productive discussion, we need a policy paper to give a direction to the debate.
When we had the debate on whether Canadian peacekeepers should stay in Bosnia-Hercegovina and in Croatia, and the debate on allowing further cruise missile testing in Canada, we, on this side of the House, criticized not the relevance of the debate nor its very nature, but the fact that the debate was going on before the government had presented its overall policy or the general direction of its defence policy.
My hon. colleague is quite right when he says that cruise missile testing and peacekeeping are part of Canada's overall defence policy. Consequently, as far as we are concerned, it is totally illogical to proceed backwards and, as I said before, put the cart before the horse by debating certain specific aspects of the defence policy before we even had a chance to discuss that policy as a whole.
In view of such criticism, we thought that the government had gotten the message. Obviously, it has not. It is back today with this debate on Canada's defence policy, without any policy paper or guidelines, except for this short paper we were given only this morning.
I think that we should have received this document much earlier so that we could have been apprised of the government's concerns and questions regarding defence policy. They only gave it to us this morning. How are we expected to have a
worthwhile debate under such conditions? What I was criticizing in this debate was not its relevance but the way it is taking place.