Madam Speaker, I commend my friend from Saint John for her longstanding and passionate advocacy of the need for our country to place much greater emphasis on our capacity to defend ourselves and advance our national sovereignty. She is certainly a very principled advocate of that.
I agreed with her remarks with the exception of her comment on procurement programs such as shipbuilding for national defence. I inferred from her comments that she was suggesting we ought to procure equipment in Canada as a sort of industrial policy.
This is a concern to me because it seems that the objective in providing a strong national defence and maximizing our scarce resources ought to be to seek the best available equipment at the lowest possible price, even if that means tendering defence procurement contracts overseas.
Does she think that if it costs us more to tender a procurement contract for defence equipment to a domestic company that this is in the best interest of advancing our capacity to defend ourselves and maximizing those scarce tax dollars?