Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my hon. colleague for splitting his time with me.
I heard the hon. government member say that Canada's productivity growth has grown. Canada's productivity growth has lagged behind that of other industrial nations in recent years and its productivity growth over the past two decades has been slower than every other G-7 country. Canada has one of the worst growth rates in the OECD.
Today I want to talk about what the government has done to the military. What happened on September 11 was a wake-up call for the government to do something. We do not have the military resources needed to look after the security of Canadians.
Let us take a look at what this government has done.
In 1993 the Liberal government cancelled the contract for EH-101s only for politics and for no other reason. That cost taxpayers $500 million and we got absolutely nothing for it. Also, look at the Sea King maintenance and upgrade program. The program put in place for this cost $600 million. Canada's search and rescue helicopter program cost $790 million. The maritime helicopter project cost $2.9 billion. Also the long term service support that the government put in place cost $1.7 billion. Administrative costs in splitting procurement cost $400 million. The total cost of these Liberal programs, with no inflation included, was $8.6 billion.
The total cost of the Conservative program for 43 EH-101s to replace the Sea Kings, based on Liberal election literature in 1994, would have been $5.8 billion. Then we would have had Sea Kings aboard those frigates that could fly, and we would not have the problems that we have within our military today. God bless those men and women who are trying to look after us.
Having sat on the defence and veterans affairs committee, it tugs at my heart when I see how little our military has received from this government in the way of support. It is not right. The government has cut back on the number of people in our army, navy and air force. The regular force ceiling has been reduced from 35,800 to 20,400. The primary reserves ceiling has been reduced from 24,000 to 20,000. Yet we are asking our men and women to perform peacekeeping duties where they do not go for just three months, but for six or eight months. Some members have come back recently. They have told me that they were ashamed because they had to borrow resources from other countries because they did not have them.
The budget coming down on December 10 must be a military security budget for every man, woman and child in Canada.
What happened to our shipbuilding program? The Minister of Industry when he was running in the election--