I hear a Liberal member down at the other end saying we are not at war. Did he just wake up? This country is at war with the United States against terrorism. I do not know where he has been sleeping.
We are at war. We have troops that have been leaving this country to go to war. Talk to those mothers, children, fathers and brothers of our service people who are over at war right now and have the chance of being killed. We are sending them there $1.3 billion short of equipment. This party is not saying that. The auditor general has said that. The Liberals should be ashamed of themselves. Anyone who thinks we are not at war does not know what is going on in this country.
The defence committee is controlled by the government. The committee recommended an increase to the budget of the Canadian forces of at least $1 billion a year. My party has consistently called for $2 billion. Even the Liberal members of the defence committee said $1 billion, which is certainly better than $250 million, and I congratulate them for that. I am sorry their Minister of National Defence and the Prime Minister did not listen to their wishes or our wishes.
We need these kinds of increases just to get into the game if we are to have a serious and credible armed forces and play a significant role in our NATO partnership. The government has given Canada the embarrassing distinction of giving the second smallest defence commitment to NATO, second only to the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. This is embarrassing for most Canadians.
Canada's commitment of 1% of gross domestic product is less than half of the NATO average of 2.2%. For Canada just to match the average spending in terms of the commitment that our allies share, it would require us to double our defence budget from $10 billion to $21 billion.
What do we get from the government? We get $1.2 billion stretched out over five years. Most of that money is already accounted for by the mission costs of Operation Apollo, special anti-terrorism measures such as JTF2 and chemical and biological hazard preparedness, and emergency preparedness. By the time these funds have been allocated, there will be only $500 million left. Stretched over just five years, that is an annual base increase of just $100 million, one-twentieth or five per cent of the minimum level that experts say is necessary to bring our forces up to operational effectiveness.
All of us in the House should be embarrassed about that, because we all support the very fine forces we have. They have done a great job of peacekeeping missions around the world, and it was unbelievable what our people did in the first world war and the second world war, but nowadays the government has decreased it to 23% of what it was. Its own committee recommends $1 billion and the auditor general recommends $1.2 billion. What do we get? We get $250 million. That is not enough and I hope the government will change its mind very quickly.
Here is what David Bercuson, a distinguished military historian who has been hired by the government in the past to analyze military affairs, has to say about the budget. He says:
[The Minister of Finance's] new budget has thrown table scraps to Canada's soldiers...Over the past year or so a substantial body of evidence has emerged that Canada's military is on a long slide to virtual oblivion...The Standing Committee on National Defence and Veterans' Affairs of the House of Commons unanimously pointed out that “providing the [Canadian] Forces with the capabilities they need to meet their commitments will require significant expenditures.” That was in addition to the forecast of the former auditor-general that calculated that the shortfall in defence expenditures over the next five years may be as high as $4.5-billion.
It simply cannot be that [the finance minister or the Prime Minister] is unaware of the desperate straits of the Canadian military today. Thus yesterday's budget must be taken as a strong signal that this government really has no interest in restoring, let alone increasing, Canadian military capability and that Canada's international role will continue to amount to little more than preaching “soft-power” morality and distributing food parcels--
This is not from the opposition. Those comments are from a very distinguished Canadian, a military expert. He states:
The only military capability the government excels at is camouflage...Although the 1994 defence white paper committed Canada to maintaining military forces capable of fighting alongside the best, against the best, that capability no longer exists. Canada's air force has virtually no capacity to conduct aerial combat operations. Canada's navy is so seriously undermanned it cannot put its entire destroyer fleet to sea. Canada's army is so hard pressed to find troops for overseas deployment that it is incapable of sending even a battalion-sized force (of about 1,000) anywhere for more than six months. Moreover, Canada has no way of getting troops and equipment anywhere without chartering private ships or aircraft--
Let us just think about that. President Bush calls up the Prime Minister and asks for couple of ships and couple of planeloads of people and the Prime Minister responds that he will have to call Air Canada and Princess Cruise lines to see if he can get them over. Or maybe he would try to buy those ferries in British Columbia that the socialists built and that are sitting in dry dock.
These comments are not those of the Canadian Alliance. They are those of a distinguished Canadian who understands the military. He concluded his report with this damning comment: “It has become the Canadian way to let others do the bleeding and dying for us”. That is a sad commentary on what is happening in the country right now.
The budget was supposed to be about physical security and economic security in the wake of September 11 and in the face of the imminent recession. Instead it provides us with more waste, more mismanagement and more taxation. It does nothing about the national debt, the second highest of the G-7. The Minister of Finance yesterday was bragging about how he had lowered our debt faster than any of the G-7 have. When a country has the second highest debt, it should be able to do that. I do not know what he is bragging about. We have the second highest national debt of the G-7.