Mr. Speaker, I welcome the comments by the hon. Solicitor General of Canada.
In the four or five minutes I have I would like to touch on a number of issues. It is reported that we have a huge number of modern day war criminals in this country. The greatest threat to any nation is always the problems within a nation. The threats from outside our nation when they become part of our nation are the greatest threats, whether criminal activity, harbouring those who are wanted for acts of genocide or other heinous crimes in their home countries and who are now living in our society, or whether it is those who are here because they want to steal the secrets we have, whether military, economic or industrial.
Until we strengthen our institutions we have designed through a democratic manner over the years to ward off these threats we are just speaking idle words.
I welcome the words of the hon. solicitor general but we must back those up by strengthening CSIS not only in numbers but also wherever it is practical and possible to give it greater legislative powers. We must strengthen the RCMP and not continue to whittle away at its budget. We are under strengthed. We must reinforce that. We must also stop allowing our military to rust out in the manner that has occurred over the last 10 or 15 years or more.
We must strengthen those institutions that protect national security, our economic security and our societal security from those external forces that once they become internal forces pose the most dire threat to the stability of this country in all these areas.
This government had better be prepared to reinforce the budgets of these institutions that we rely on to protect our security, the security of our industries and the high tech development occurring, to protect those secrets from encroachment and incursion by forces outside of our country that have almost an open door to move across our borders into our country and set up their espionage organizations to take these secrets from our very high tech society in this country and use them against us.
I welcome the comments of the solicitor general. Let us see some action behind those words. He can rest assured that he will receive support from the Reform Party caucus of Canada.