Madam Speaker, my father-in-law was on the Murmansk run. He was in Burma with the Navy. At that time, Canada, a country of 11 million, as poor as we were coming out of the depression, ended up with the fourth largest navy in the world. It showed the will of this nation, not only of our air force, our massive armed presence in Europe, but our navy. What we built in ships in that period of time is a marvel that we should be proud of. Many of those ships are long gone and Canada walked away on the incredible capacity that we built in that period. I think that to our previous generation, we dropped the ball and we cannot allow the ball to be dropped any further.
In the House of Commons on February 4th, 2009. See this statement in context.