Mr. Speaker, I will address the folks back home. I want to tell everybody who is watching at home or in the offices around the Hill today what is going on.
The Liberals are swallowing hard on a subject on which they ran a campaign in 1993. They told Canadians they wanted to scrap a Conservative initiative to purchase EH-101 helicopters which were clearly the best helicopters that could have been purchased. The Prime Minister went about beating his chest during the election campaign and said that cancelling this would save money. At the end of the day, what will happen is that the Liberals will spend a lot more money in aggregate and we will get less helicopters in return. That is what is called Liberal fiscal responsibility; pay more for less.
In the meantime, this is not just a tongue in cheek kind of cute argument. People have died as a result of that flawed decision. People lost their lives operating those helicopters that should not have been in the air because of the Prime Minister and his government's decision. This is not just a question of money. This is a question of sacrificing the lives of our forces. The Liberals should be really ashamed of that.
We are looking at about $600 million in cancellation fees that the Liberals brought upon themselves by cancelling the contract. It is a lot of money but it gets worse than that. It is also the fact that they paid all that money over the last decade to keep these flying heaps in the air. When we consider that some of them were bought in 1964, that is a long time.
As a matter of fact, it was 12 years before I was born. I will even venture to say that the Prime Minister, who went about beating his chest in 1993 about the ending of this contract, was probably not even elected when these helicopters were bought. It is an absolute shame to consider that our men and women in the forces have been flying things that are absolutely in heaps by everybody else's standard.
I want to quote from some things here. This is absolutely choice. This just goes to show to what lengths the Prime Minister and some of those around him are willing to go in order to try to quash this project so that they do not have to wipe the egg off their faces because they did not order the EH-101. The EH-101 won the contract fair and square. What did the government do to hide that, to obfuscate it, to delay it?
This is from an article from the London Free Press written by Greg Weston. The date of this is last February 22. For those folks back home who want to check it, they can look it up on the Internet. He said:
By mid-1997, sources say it had become apparent the bidding was again going to be won by the Cormorant.
By the way, the Cormorant is the parent of the EH-101. It is the same brand of helicopter. It goes on:
Now, buying Cormorant helicopters from the same group that got $600 million of public money for Chrétien's cancelling of the original contract of Cormorants—