Mr. Speaker, I first want to say, and I mean this sincerely, I appreciate that the Minister of National Defence remained in the House, listened to my remarks and obviously took them to heart. Even though he said, by his own admission, that he disagrees with much of what I said, that does not detract from the fact that I, as a member of the opposition, appreciate that he remained in the House and addressed my concerns. I only wish that more ministers would learn from that, would make themselves available to the opposition during debate in the House of Commons and respond in a good way to the questions, and would put forward the opposite arguments where they are to be put forward.
Very quickly, I want to try to address a few of the points the minister raised.
On missile defence, the minister states that it is on stream. On stream? This has been 20 years in the making. I support the fact that at least we are talking about it and I commend the minister for at least moving the ball that far, but I think we should have public statements made on where we stand, and certainly the member for LaSalle—Émard, as the incoming leader of the Liberal government, should be making public statements on where he stands on that issue. Surely after 20 years he has decided where he stands on it if he wants to be the prime minister of the country.
Next is the request for additional armoured vehicles. One of the reasons I raised the issue of the Iltis, not only in my speech but over the past number of weeks since that unfortunate tragedy, is that the fact remains: if the government had replaced them when they were due to be replaced four or five years ago, and in fact even then they were overdue to be replaced, they would not be in theatre in Afghanistan. We would not have those vehicles there. We would have something better than those vehicles: something more dependable and safer.
As I said, and as the minister admitted, the investigation is still ongoing into that unfortunate tragedy. We do not yet know all the ramifications of that particular incident. Maybe it will be shown that it would not have mattered what those two soldiers were riding in on that particular day; maybe, unfortunately and tragically, they would have been killed anyway. But we do know that in that particular vehicle, they had no chance, none. My argument, and it remains valid, I believe, is that had we replaced those vehicles, had we moved as a nation and, in his defence, before this minister was minister, and had the government moved as a government and replaced those vehicles with something like the armoured Humvees the Americans use, their chances of survival would have been much higher. I stand by that.
Yes, we saw an improvement last year with some $800 million in the defence budget. We on this side lauded that. We recognized, though, that it was insufficient. I think even the minister recognized that. He would have liked to have had more. Much more needs to be done on this. We have to allocate more resources for our Canadian armed forces. He referred to $160 million in the capital expenditure budget; it is simply not enough. I think the minister himself would admit that it is not enough. There are too many items in our inventory that are long overdue for replacement.
Referring to the helicopters, I wrote down what the minister said. Basically, he said as fast as it can be accomplished. He is trying to move expeditiously and it remains a number one priority. There again, similar to missile defence, it was ten years ago that this Prime Minister, this outgoing Prime Minister, with a single stroke of his pen, cancelled those helicopters, the EH-101s. Since then, for ten years the government has been trying to rig the procurement process so that the EH-101 and the models that have replaced it do not qualify. It has been reducing the requirements and reducing the criteria to try, for political reasons, to get other helicopters to meet the requirements, so that the government and the Prime Minister do not have to be embarrassed by ten years later buying virtually the same helicopter with the improved avionics, which we should have had ten years ago.
The last thing: put the people first. I would argue that sadly there are far too many examples which show that much more needs to be done. Yes, improvements have been made, and I concede that to the minister, but much more needs to be done. I used one example, that of the upcoming rent increases for many of our Canadian armed forces families. These are young families. At a time when we are at war on terror, many of these people are deployed overseas. They are under an incredible amount of stress and anxiety and, at this very time, the government is going to increase the rent on their houses. They are not even sure if mom or dad is going to come home. Something is wrong here, and then the minister turns around and says the government is putting people first. I do not think so.