Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Kootenay East. I hope my voice will hang in there. If you see my lips moving and no sound, you will know it has disappeared.
Today's topic is a rather interesting one. At this time I could see a lot better wording than might be part of this question. We should start off by saying as the last member has, how proud we are of our aerospace industry and of our astronauts. Certainly every time we hear the Canadarm mentioned, all of us feel proud of what we have accomplished. Our future is in the area of technology and that is certainly something all Canadians know and are proud of.
However, when we talk about this motion, about Canadian content and about the protection of some industries over others, I
cannot help but go back a little bit in history. I cannot help but go back a little bit in terms of what some of the other members are saying.
I cannot help but go back to the F-18 contract in Winnipeg. Obviously the lowest bid was there and the recommendations were there. The qualifications for doing the job were there. Certainly the people of Manitoba, the people of the west do not forget the party politics that were played in the decision to move the F-18 contract to Montreal. Now we hear the other side of that. Now we hear the fears that we are going to lose this industry for Quebec.
All of us are looking for a free enterprise system in which all parts of Canada are treated equally, where one part does not have favoured status over the other, where we stop playing party politics and we start getting down to what is good for Canada. That should be the emphasis instead of what we are talking about today.
We also have to look at the criteria when we look at defence contracts. Obviously we want to have Canadian content, but not Canadian content if it is not competitive. If it is not competitive, it better get competitive if that industry is going to survive. If it has to be subsidized and protected, then it is obviously very short term and very short sighted planning by that company and by this government.
We also must be aware of globalization and what that means. We are now in a global market. We now have NAFTA and the World Trade Organization. We cannot talk about protecting industry and protecting the inefficiencies of the past.
We have to talk about being competitive in the world. We have the training. We have the technology. We have the people. Let us not hide behind government, behind bureaucracy, or behind rules that set up how we are going to give contracts. Let us do it because we are the best. Let us do it because we are the most competitive and thus we will market our products around the world. That is what globalization and free trade means. It is what the World Trade Organization will mean in 10 years. Canada can do very well in that field. So, let us not be embarrassed and shy and not be out front. Let us not hide behind the past.
We could also be talking about the Department of National Defence today. We all know that it desperately needs new equipment. All of us know of the helicopters. My hon. seatmate here talked about helicopters falling out of the sky. Certainly the search and rescue people need that equipment, but let us have a game plan. DND must have a real game plan, what it needs and what it is going to do. It seems as though we get knee-jerk announcements. We have heard announcements about a $600 million expenditure for helicopters, but the minister does not know for how many. I could not believe what I heard in that announcement.
We obviously need all terrain vehicles. It was shameful what our troops used in the former Yugoslavia. With regard to armaments, we must keep modern and up to date and have the best for Canadians.
Looking at the budgets, we can see that for years we have been cutting budgets and we have increased the requirement for our armed forces. This has done nothing except to cause morale problems and equipment problems in the military.
We need to become diligent shoppers. That does not necessarily mean we have to buy in Canada. Remember, we must be competitive.
This is a very timely topic today. I would also like to know what provisions we have in place to prevent the patronage of the past which was so common. Everybody knew about it and it seems to have carried on into the present government. We need to make sure there are guidelines in place so that this does not happen again. It does not give politicians a good name and it certainly does not give Canadians a good name when this sort of thing takes place. We should not be politicians for sale.
We also have to ask questions about DND and the seemingly constant turmoil. It appears as though it is constantly having problems. No sooner does one crisis go away than a new one surfaces. We have to ask what it is doing to get its act together. That could easily be a topic for today.
I refer to the former deputy minister of DND. I wonder why approximately a year ago he quickly disappeared from the scene to go to the United Nations as if to get him out of town.
What about the EH-101s? How much did it cost to pay those off?
The hon. member across the way mentioned that we should be very proud of our students and graduates who are filling technical jobs. I am very proud of them but I am concerned because at the University of Waterloo for example, 91 per cent of graduates in the electronics area are going to the U.S. for jobs. I am really concerned about that. I am concerned that we spent that money on training. That is a costly resource and we are losing them because they cannot get a job in Canada. We must work on that because they are the best.
We have to talk about peacekeeping as well when we talk about armaments and DND. We need to know what to expect from our military. We need to have that game plan before we actually start talking about and worrying about the content of the equipment we are buying. We need to discuss it in Parliament. We need to discuss what those objectives and criteria are. We cannot keep doing things on a knee-jerk basis. We cannot do things where we have parliamentary debate and the decision has already been announced outside the House. We cannot keep doing that.
We need to do something to restore public confidence as well. There is a great pride in our Canadian peacekeepers. There is a great pride in what we have, but when we send them underequipped and poorly controlled we have problems. We know what that has done to our reputation. We can talk about Somalia; we can talk about Rwanda; we can talk about the former Yugoslavia. All of those are problems which have hurt our reputation. We should be concerned about that.
We need to set up criteria. We cannot go every place. We are not equipped to do that. We do not have the equipment. We know that we must ask about the cost, not that cost is more important than lives, but that is the reality. We cannot go everywhere. We can only afford so much and we have to ask those questions.
In looking at these criteria we do need new equipment. We need to raise morale. We need efficiency. We need to get rid of the bureaucracy that seems to be causing all the problems.
In closing, rather than whining about competition and Canadian content, we should get competitive. We should worry about our place in the marketplace. We should demand a fair and open bidding system. We should get rid of the politics, the patronage and the old line political games that so often go on. That will do more.