Madam Speaker, I was very interested to hear the remarks of the hon. member opposite. Unfortunately, I have not reviewed the guard of honor. I guess he was accompanying the Prime Minister or some minister. I was more involved with the lower ranks, with enlisted personnel, with the people we never see but who live in a submarine in a room the size of a toilet. I listened to these people. I certainly did not inspect the boots of the military standing at attention on Parliament Hill or anywhere else.
But I can tell you that I saw the terrible things that partisan politics, no doubt—it cannot be from anything else—prevents the hon. member from criticizing, like the member for Nepean—Carleton, who sits on the same committee as I do.
Earlier, I mentioned a francophone in Trenton who has a young quadriplegic child. The child is three and a half years old and does not speak yet. The name of the person is Denis Paquette. He is at the Trenton base. All he wants is a transfer back to Quebec so his child may be taught to speak. This is all the child will be able to do.
I contacted Corporal Paquette in Trenton, as the hon. member was starting her speech. He said he is getting nothing but reprisals for complaining to the committee when it visited Trenton and is being told that he might be encouraged to leave. He has been told that, if he is transferred to Quebec City, it will be for compassionate reasons, but they will not pay to move him or his family. That is the member's wonderful Canadian armed forces.
It is time a look was taken at the army's human resources. I could almost believe that the soldier who wrote Une armée en déroute was right. Our soldiers are poorly paid and poorly outfitted. They travel in style, on lovely big vessels, leaving the Sea Kings aside, but they do have new equipment. Everything has been spent on equipment and very little on human resources and soldiers' well-being.
I do not think that the member would agree to live in the so-called PMQs, the houses soldiers are provided with that are not fit for a modern family, where the stoves do not even have hoods to vent cooking odours. Is this what the member thinks makes our army so wonderful right now and contributes to the well-being of soldiers? I think not.
I call on members to have a bit of compassion and to listen to soldiers' complaints, such as that of Denis Paquette, about the insurmountable human problems they are up against. And to think that the leader of the Progressive Conservative Party has just been told that the army is wonderful, that there are no problems and that she is making it out to be worse than it really is.
We spent three weeks on the ground. Some of the committee sessions lasted from 1.00 or 1.30 p.m. until midnight. Like the member for Pontiac—Gatineau—Labelle, we heard soldiers tell us that they were not even allowed to see their own medical file. The excuse given was national security. This is wonderful?
It is time that members examined their conscience, that for once they set aside partisan politics, that they set the record straight and admitted that our soldiers are badly paid and badly outfitted. A soldier came to tell us that he had been waiting six months for boots and nobody believed him until his colonel came to tell us it was true. He had no boots. For six months, the man had been wearing the boots of another soldier who had retired last year. What does she have to say to the soldiers in Bosnia who buy kevlar suits from the Americans? How are we going to send them over? Wearing loincloths, like the Indian tribes of old?