Madam Speaker, I am pleased to have the opportunity to rise in debate in support of this concurrence motion for the report of the Standing Committee on National Defence and Veterans Affairs at this particularly prescient moment.
As I said in my remarks on the motion before the House regarding the tragedy that struck the United States last week, the whole world has changed dramatically, particularly the world in terms of strategic considerations for free countries such as Canada, for NATO countries in particular. Yet the dramatic new realities we face, particularly on the strategic front, have not in any way been reflected by the government.
Let us start from first principles. The first responsibility of a national and federal government is the maintenance and protection of national sovereignty. It is not one among competing objectives. It is not some nice to do thing that finds its way onto the list of government programs. It is the first principal responsibility of a national government.
There are dozens, probably hundreds of programs administered by the federal government at taxpayers' expense where the federal government has no constitutional responsibility. Yet it has neglected its principal, its first, its primary responsibility year after year, and not just this government but its predecessor governments going back nearly four decades.
When the second world war ended Canada had the third largest navy in the world. The Royal Canadian Air Force was regarded as perhaps the most respected military air force in the world. Our ground troops had punched far beyond their weight in the ground war in Europe and in military actions in the Pacific theatre in that war. We finished that terrible five year conflict proud as a nation of the tremendous contribution we had made, marshalling our national resources, tragically sacrificing so much Canadian blood but for a noble objective.
For the past 30 years, and particularly under the Liberal government for the past 8 or 9 years, we have seen that proud military tradition and our ability to do our moral duty eroded by indifference, eroded by the wrong priorities, eroded by a federal government that does not recognize the safety and security of its citizens and the protection of its national sovereignty as its primary objective.
Between the years 1994 and 1999 the government exercised a modest expenditure restraint program. Mainly it raised revenues and raised taxes to address the crushing deficit, but it did restrain program spending in certain areas. Again, however, the way in which it cut reflected its complete perversion of priorities because it cut defence spending by over 20% at a time when non-defence department program spending was cut by only 3%.
What this indicates is that the first primary responsibility of the federal government was cut most deeply and the lower priority areas which are not even contemplated in the constitution as federal responsibilities were barely touched at all. This is the world turned upside down in terms of public responsibilities.
Madam Speaker, I neglected to mention that I will be splitting my time.
We are left in the regrettable situation whereby Canada reinvests less than half among the average of NATO countries in defence expenditures as a percentage of gross domestic product. Our 19 NATO allies on average spend 2.1% of their gross domestic product in defence of national sovereignty whereas Canada spends only 1.2% of GDP, giving us the second lowest defence expenditure in NATO, ahead of only the tiny duchy of Luxembourg with a military force of 800 people.
We have become, notwithstanding the tremendously hardworking, skilled, dedicated and patriotic people in our military force, a token player at best in the military alliance in which we, as one of the world's largest economies, the most prosperous nations, have a moral responsibility to be a bulwark in.
We have the seventh largest gross domestic product in the world, a great blessing for a small country, and an enormously prosperous standard of living and national wealth. However, while we have the seventh largest gross domestic product, we have the twenty-sixth largest defence investment and we are 18th of out of the 19 NATO countries.
This is a complete betrayal of our national tradition as a country that is willing to invest resources to at least do our share, if not more than our share, to defend democracy and peace here and abroad.
Look at the particulars raised by some of my colleagues earlier in the debate that have been discussed at the defence committee.
For instance, according to the 1994 defence white paper, we are supposed to be able to field at least a brigade of 5,500 ground troops abroad at a high state of readiness in a conventional conflict. It is absolutely clear that we do not have the capacity to do so right now, according to every expert in our defence.
Only 83 of our 120-some fighter craft CF-18s are operational and virtually none of those fighter craft have modern, contemporary radar and electronics equipment systems which are critical, indispensable, to engaging in modern air combat.
We have no lift capacity for our ground troops. Even if we had 5,500 troops that we could put on the ground at a high state of readiness, in the words of retired Major-General Lewis MacKenzie we would have to hitch a ride and take a taxi from American aircraft in order to transport our troops to a theatre of conflict.
Our much celebrated frigate fleet cannot even put to sea simultaneously. Often one sees those frigates tied up in Halifax or Esquimalt because they do not even have a budget for fuel to operate for the course of an entire month.
This is an embarrassment and it is a humiliation to the men and women who risk their lives to defend our national sovereignty.
Ten years ago, we had a defence force smaller than our share of 90,000 people in our military, now down to 55,000. We have essentially halved our commitment. We have done this, I believe, because it reflects a philosophical attitude of the Liberal government that investments in national defence and protection of sovereignty are not a priority, that it is a frivolous occupation of would be warmongers and that the second war was the war to end all wars. That was folly between 1918 and 1939. Equally it is folly today, as we have seen from last week's events.
Regrettably, I heard the defence minister virtually dismiss out of hand in question period the other day the notion that there would be a conventional war as a result of the attack on America and the free world last week. When pressed as to why he made this assumption he had no clear answer.
I would like to close by saying that we may very well, as a free nation in NATO, find ourselves in the midst of not just one conventional conflict but potentially serial conventional conflicts over the coming years. We do not know, but it is our moral responsibility to be prepared for that eventuality and to do so means that we must fundamentally reorder the priorities of the federal government to at least do our share.
To do that, even to have the average military expenditure amongst NATO countries would mean a $9 billion increase in our defence budget. That is a huge line item, but we must begin to think about the magnitude of reordering our priorities, to do our share and to do our military men and women proud as well as preserving our rich tradition as a defender of democracy and freedom.