Mr. Speaker, the guilty do not like having their names read out loud. What it boils down to is that the Cormorants were the proper choice. It did not cost the Prime Minister. Who are we kidding? He is using taxpayer dollars in Shawinigan. It actually cost Canadian taxpayers $600 million. Then he decided he needed a political fixer.
Since I cannot name names, he brought in the Deputy Prime Minister as his trusty political fixer. The Prime Minister instructed the Deputy Prime Minister that the Cormorant through another bidding process was not to win. In other words, there would be a contest but the Cormorant or a version of the EH-101 could not be allowed to win. That was the rule. It goes on:
In December 1997, the (Prime Minister) headed south for his usual month of golf, reassured by the military that the Cormorant bid was history. But a funny thing happened on the way to the contracting office. The (Deputy Prime Minister) had to phone the (Prime Minister) in Florida to tell him the Cormorant had won.
They rejigged the process all over again and the Cormorant won fair and square. The Prime Minister's response to the news was described as largely unprintable. Expletives were uttered by the Prime Minister because he hated the fact that the Cormorant won the process by a fair bid.
It talks about a memo from a fellow officer to Air Force Commander L.C. Campbell, whom I have quoted before, which began:
Assuming there will be a competition to select the new maritime helicopter, it is quite possible that the Cormorant might win it.
It went on to ask:
How do you ensure that it does not win a maritime helicopter competition?
It then referred to the military and went on to say:
If the Cormorant were to win a military helicopter competition on its merits, wouldn't we again be in the same position of being accused of tricking the government?
Should the military not be the one to decide what helicopter would best service its function? Yet we have the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister and the cabinet interfering with the decision and competition process by saying the Cormorant is not allowed to win because they promised they would gut the program in 1993 when they were running during the election campaign.
It is very serious that they would waste billions of dollars of taxpayer money, put lives on the line and contribute to the death of our armed forces just because they did not want to get egg on their faces. Shame on the government. Shame on the Prime Minister and shame on the Deputy Prime Minister.
I would like to talk a bit about what these helicopters will be used for because even the minister seems to have some fuzzy logic about it. Basically they would be used for search and rescue. When I visited the base in Esquimalt I was told by military personnel that they could not do the job because of the situation. They had to bring in Americans in the Straits of Juan de Fuca. The Canadian forces could not perform this job but the Liberals are continuing to delay.
Search and rescue is one of the functions. Canadians are not doing a lot of it or as much as they should, especially when we consider that for every hour in the air there are 40 hours of maintenance on any helicopter in the air. That is the search and rescue story.
Let us think about the anti-submarine warfare activities. By having helicopters on the back of naval warships it multiplies by 25 times the ability of the ship to conduct anti-submarine warfare. As the ship is sailing along the helicopter flies off the back of the ship, goes out to the limits of its circumference, drops a boom into the water and listens for subs underneath. It drastically improves the ability of sub hunting.
Even though we only spend a scant few hours a year up in the Arctic with icebreakers, if we are lucky, our minister happens to think that anti-sub warfare is “a relic of the cold war”. He does not believe we should be enforcing sovereignty. The minister does not think that is important.
The job of our military, our navy, and these helicopters is to police our boundaries and to find out whether other nations are conducting submarine operations, whether they be under the ice or off either of our coasts. If our minister with his Liberal, fuzzy-headed, soft, mushy logic does not think we should be finding out whose subs are in our waters, we have a serious problem. That is pretty serious.
I could go on and on but I realize that my time has come to an end. I know that members on the other side will prattle on about procedures for bureaucratic buying.