Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your warning to the House on various phrases with and descriptions of the word honest. I am going to try to stay away from that. I almost was ready to go there, but I will stay away from that.
I have to tell the House that as I listened to the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of National Defence he forever reminded me of when I was a kid and we would hear the rooster crowing in the morning. I would say “That is quite a rooster” to my father. He would say “Yes, he sure is, but look at what he is standing on”. He was standing on the manure pile. I can tell the House right now that he reminded me forever of that rooster, all puffed up, his feathers just a-shining, the bright sunlight in the morning hitting on him as the king of the manure pile.
I would advise the parliamentary secretary to go out and seek the consensus of Canadians as to what they would like our military to do and what they would like our military to be.
In the little community of New Ross, Nova Scotia, where I grew up, there are a hundred and some names on the cenotaph. It is a small community of less than 2,000 people. Every year on November 11, we read those names. Those names did not get there by accident. They were put there because those Canadian soldiers from all the forces, men and women, paid the ultimate sacrifice so that we might have the privileges we have today. This is not a question of political dialogue. This is not a question of debate.
It is a fact that we sent our forces to Afghanistan and did not have transport planes to send them in. That is a fact. We had to hire American military transports to transport our soldiers and gear. They went there with camouflage that would enable them to fight in a forest surrounding. Maybe we should have realized that there were not many forests in Afghanistan. To add insult to injury, the Americans offered our Canadian soldiers American uniforms with desert camouflage. Our military--and I am not talking about our generals, I am talking about the parliamentary secretary, the minister, and the government--refused to order off the shelf, ready to wear uniforms from the Yanks because it thought it would be better to have them made in Canada, and if they came eight months later that was just too bad.
Come on: Where is our responsibility to our men and women in uniform? What is the responsibility of Canadian parliamentarians? It surely is not to debate this on a partisan basis.
Our troops arrived in Afghanistan without uniforms. There were no uniforms readily available or provided. Our troops arrived in Afghanistan without provisions and without water. We had to depend upon the Americans for water. We could not even supply our troops with drinking water. Their rations had to be boiled. They did not have water to boil them in.
Hundreds of years ago, military generals figured out that troops in the field operate on their stomachs. We can give them the best ammunitions, the best munitions, better firepower, better rifles and good air cover, but they have to eat. They need water to drink. They need provisions. We sent our forces to a war zone. We did not send them on a picnic. We did not send them on manoeuvres with our NATO allies. We sent them to a war zone.
This is not about some type of an exercise held in Manitoba or New Brunswick. This is about the real thing. We sent our troops to Afghanistan and they were not prepared. We should be ashamed of ourselves. If there are any members of the House who are not ashamed, they should ask themselves the next question. The army performed excellently with the tools it was given but that does not take away the fact that it deserved to have better tools. This is not rocket science. Our troops need the best tools they can possibly have. They are in life and death situations.
On Saturday I attended the memorial service that added Private Ricky Green's name to the monument in the town of Chester. He was killed in action in Afghanistan. It was a tragedy for the Green family, for his fiancée, for his father and mother and for his uncles. It was a huge tragedy. That happens when people don the uniform of their country and go to war. We understand that. Our job as parliamentarians is to do everything in our power to make sure it does not happen or that it happens as little as possible.
We have a responsibility greater than our responsibility to partisan politics. This is not some debate about helicopters. We know we should have had helicopters. They were cancelled. Who cancelled them? The Liberal government cancelled them. We have taken a few of the EH-101s. The Cormorants have arrived. We had two arrive in Nova Scotia last week. The first ones that came were spirited away to British Columbia and up to Iqaluit because the government was embarrassed to see these new helicopters sitting on the tarmac anywhere else in the country.
This is no longer a question of whose fault it was. We need helicopters. It is going to take a minimum of three years from the date they are ordered to start taking delivery of them, so let us order them. The military has told us time and time again what they need. They have laid down their specifications on paper. The government has changed those specifications at least twice, and I think probably more than that.
They can crow all they want about what they have done for the military, but I can tell them that as a Canadian I have stood in front of the cenotaph in the little community I live in every November 11 for most of my adult life. As a matter of fact, when I was a Christmas tree grower we used to stop our crews at 11 in the morning on November 11 and take our moment of silence in the woods.
I do not need to listen to the shiny feathers standing on a manure pile. My grandfather was a veteran of World War I and World War II. He would be embarrassed if he were alive today. These men fought with distinction. My father and my uncles were in World War II. They fought for their country. They did not question it or try to make excuses for it. They recognized a need and they responded to it.
It is our job as members of Parliament to recognize the need and respond to it and that means giving our men and women in uniform the tools they deserve to do the job, the tools to give them a chance to do the jobs we delegate them to do.
With the responsibilities we as members of Parliament give them, they need to have every chance and every opportunity to do the best job they can do. They cannot do that with secondary weaponry, secondary uniforms and secondary helicopters. They cannot begin to do the job we ask them to do.