Mr. Speaker, I want to respond by making a comment on the hon. member's presentation.
I congratulate him on coming from a great part of Canada, the Chicoutimi area. I know the area quite well. I used to spend parts of the summer there with my family staying at the Club de chasse in Tadoussac. I fished on Lake Tadoussac at the mouth of the Saguenay. It is a very beautiful part of the world.
With respect to the tenor of his comments, some of the things the member said may sound sensible and logical. Perhaps in different times we nurtured the idea of Canadian content when we could afford it. It was a luxury. I point to the St. Laurent class destroyer, to the DDH280 and to other acquisitions that had total Canadian content, with some exceptions of boiler equipment and other auxiliary machinery.
All countries are cutting back. In the course of my duties as parliamentary secretary over the last two years I have had the occasion to meet with the secretary of defense if the United States, the minister of defence of the Federal Republic of Germany, the minister of defence of Holland and other defence ministers. If there is one thing we have in common it is that we are cutting back. There is a peace dividend. The cold war is over. While we are peacekeeping and fighting brush fires which are real wars in that sense, the scale is different.
In the last decade the Department of National Defence has given up $21 billion and 21,000 men and women in uniform, 45 per cent of its civilian workforce. It has reduced the reserves from 29,000 to 23,000 in two years. We can no longer do what we used to do and I did not find that factored into the equation presented by the hon. member.
I know he did not intend to mislead. To talk about principles, theories and things that would be nice if there were no limitation on funding is one thing. However, if he would look at the reality of the situation, at the issues that dictate procurement policy in national defence, he might come up with a slightly different approach. I want to ensure the hon. member has factored that into his equation.
It is the same with conversion. The answer to conversion is not a massive infusion of money. Canada cannot afford that. Let us try to do like other countries have done with initiatives and other ways of doing it, as I suggested earlier in my presentation were presented by the Minister of Industry and the minister of public works.