Madam Speaker, before I begin this debate I want to thank my hon. colleague from Broadview-Greenwood for his usual intelligent, logical, non-political intervention in this debate, which I think is slowly starting to rise in its level of intelligence. He has introduced some sense and some logic and some good debatable points into this debate. Because I have such respect for the points he has made, I am not going to reinforce them in my presentation.
I want to start with the motion to provide a backdrop for my debate this morning:
That the House condemn the government for having dropped the Canadian content requirements in the contracts for the purchase of military equipment and refusing to set up a genuine program for the conversion of the military industry, thus endangering the Canadian aerospace industry located in Montreal.
Coming from Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition, I would expect that it would take into consideration not just the aerospace industry in Montreal but the aerospace industry in Canada, and indeed all the military industry in Canada. You cannot talk about the military industry and relate it to one province. We just do not do business that way in our country. The hon. members know that as well.
I will give a personal experience, which will provide the thread for my thesis. My thesis essentially is that we can no longer continue to do business the way we have been doing it. The climate is not the same. The military climate is not the same and the fiscal climate is not the same. We have changed, and we have changed for a reason. If the hon. members opposite would follow the logic of my presentation, I give them forewarning that this is the general pattern.
In my previous incarnation I had the fortune, or some would say misfortune, to serve at Department of National Defence headquarters. For an operational officer in any branch of the armed forces, this is not considered the highlight of one's career. One likes to be out in the field driving ships, tanks, airplanes, or whatever the case may be.
My first tour, which was rather traumatic, came in 1967, my first time in Department of National Defence headquarters, or Canadian forces headquarters, as it was then called. One of the first projects I became involved in was a replacement ship for the 20 St. Laurent class destroyers that were built in the post-war period.
I have to say in deference to the issue, and I would be less than honest if I did not, that they did have Canadian content and were considered to be among the best in the world. It was a different time, a different environment, different circumstances-post-war. In 1967 the debate for the replacement of those destroyers had begun. Not only had it begun but it had been going on for some time, maybe a couple of years.
If you can take a snippet of this point in history, the genesis had been set for the four gas turbine general purpose frigates, or DDH-280s, as they became known. There were four special ships in the making, but they had a long time to go as well.
In 1967 the debate had already begun on a replacement for the 20 post-war destroyers. On December 22, 1977, ten years later, a
cabinet document approved the construction of the Canadian patrol frigates. That was in December 1977.
I will now report that the last of that class of frigate will be commissioned next year. Actually HMCS St. John's will be commissioned in St. John's, Newfoundland on June 24, 1996, and the last of that class will be commissioned in Cornwall, HMCS Ottawa , in September 1996. After approval in 1977, the last to roll off and be commissioned will be practically 20 years later. That is a long time. That is 30 years from the conception to the last of the class delivery. I do not care what anyone says. I do not care what province they are from. I do not care what they represent or what discipline they belong to. That is too long.
During the cold war we produced equipment for something that might happen. It is happening today. There are 50 wars going on and we are involved in some of them. We cannot have equipment for tomorrow; we have to have it for today. We cannot go on planning for 30 years, expecting and not delivering.
If they do not want to heed what the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of National Defence and Veterans Affairs has to say, I refer them to none other than the auditor general. In his 1993 report he essentially reinforced more eloquently and more specifically the points which I have made. He found three major difficulties with the present procurement system in national defence.
There were 550 major capital projects under way at one point in time. A capital project was in the vicinity of $100 million. That in itself is a challenge.
I am going to repeat this because if I heard somebody say this in the House I would say that they were wrong by a multiplier of 10. The first difficulty which the auditor general found was that it took 5,550 days from the time a capability deficiency was discovered in the inventory of capital equipment in national defence until Treasury Board approval. Not delivery, approval. It took 5,550 days which is 15 years. The system is cumbersome. The number of man hours used in that process would indicate why national defence headquarters was so large and why there was so much difficulty in reaching agreement on the kind of equipment we needed.
The second difficulty was that one of the major pieces of baggage the defence program management system had was the business of content and industrial regional benefits which were always built into the program. As my hon. colleague for Broadview-Greenwood has pointed out, that is no longer permissible under the free trade agreement.
The difficulty was that in trying to build in regional industrial benefits and offsets, quite often the major contract was averted. The major project which was proceeding apace, logically and reasonably, despite the time frame involved, got thrown off course because of an interjection which was too far downstream to be brought into the original concept of the contract. That threw the system off. The end result was that we did not get the best equipment for the money spent. Yes, it was rationalized, but the auditor general did not believe the rationalization was reasonable.
The third major difficulty which the auditor general found in 1993 was that because of the length of time it took to produce Treasury Board approval for the equipment and because of the dynamic instability inherent in the system, by the time the product was produced it did not necessarily relate to the threat or the deficiency which existed 15, 20 or 30 years before.