Mr. Speaker, I support the motion because because I think Canadians want to have some very clear answers to some pretty logical questions.
I am not a military expert. I do not know one plane from another. All I know is that they have wings. However, I am hearing from many of my constituents who have been writing to me, phoning me and a lot of them who are experts are giving me a great deal of advice and asking a lot of questions on this issue. I want to bring these logical questions to the fore because they need to be answered. What we are talking about here is the most expensive equipment procurement in military history in this country.
The government is adamant, first and foremost, that it needs the F-35, which will, at the end of the day, cost taxpayers $16 billion. The big question we want the Conservatives to answer is why they need these F-35s. The Minister of National Defence tells us that we need them to protect our airspace from Russians. He talked about Russian aircraft attempting to penetrate Canadian Arctic airspace and so we had to release the CF-18s. That was the minister's statement. We then hear that NORAD, and Canadian fighter pilots have told us, is a routine kind of flight that goes on all the time. They have test flights that go on all the time. What we do know is that these “invading Russian fighter planes” happen to be 60-year-old propeller planes. I am asking these questions because they do not make any sense to me. We also hear from the fighter pilots that this is just routine stuff that is going on. However, I think most of us believe that the cold war ended a while ago, so I have no idea what we are talking about and I need an answer to that, as do my constituents.
If we do need planes to protect our airspace, what is the most appropriate plane that we need? I have been told that the Boeing Super Hornet could fit the bill because not only are the Hornets good for protection, but we need to look at a two-engine plane instead of a one-engine plane, mainly because the Canadian airspace is so massive that we need to have a back-up engine if we are flying across that airspace and a bird flies into the engine or something else happens. This is a big issue. We have always felt that we needed two-engine planes in this country. We have always believed that and followed that, and now we are being told that this one-engine plane is very necessary and that it is the most important thing.
If we are protecting our airspace, why do we need a stealth fighter? Most experts tell us that a non-stealth fighter would do that job very well. What I want to know is whether this is the most appropriate plane that we are being told we need to get.
I also want to know if we need these planes now. We know that the CF-18s have been upgraded and rebuilt so that they will be fully operative and operational beyond 2020, so it is obvious that we do not need the F-35s now.
I need to drag up the argument that whenever we ask these basic questions in the House, we never get the appropriate answers. We get this rhetoric that I have just debunked. The government always raises the argument that it was the Liberals who opened up this question to put up Canadian aerospace companies to compete for worldwide contracts. The Conservatives are saying that we did it. Now we hear that the ADM at the time this was being negotiated, Alan Williams, said that of course we negotiated the agreement with Lockheed Martin. He remains adamant and absolutely vocal that this did not commit Canada to actually purchase the joint strike fighter. Asking why the Liberals did it at the time, it was to open up competition for Canadian aerospace companies. It did not commit us to buying it and we did not say that we would buy it.
By the way, turning to the question about priorities and costs, at the time we were talking about new jets, if I am not mistaken, we had a $13 billion surplus and we had a $3 billion contingency fund somewhere. We could talk about buying a Mercedes when we had a lot of money in the bank. However, we are now talking at a time of unprecedented deficits in this country and little money to spend.
When we only have a small amount of spending money at a time of an unprecedented deficit of $56 billion and counting, when we have the highest unemployment that we have had in the last 14 years, when we have 151,000 people in Canada out of work and when we find that young people have one of the highest unemployment rates in this country, how are we setting priorities here?
When I looked at my household budget, I had to made decisions when we had less money than we had at certain good times. Those decisions are core priorities. Anybody who did economics 101 will tell us that priorities are based on a hierarchy of needs. What do we need most? What is the most important thing we need at a particular time in our lives when we have a limited sum of money? What do we need first and foremost?
We have a $56 billion deficit. We have the need for job creation because we are told we will be into a jobless recovery. We need to look not just at part-time jobs, not just at job sharing, but at the ability for people to have full-time, sustainable jobs so they can pay their mortgages and not lose their homes. We are talking about that very basic question that people are asking.
In a recent report that came out about a week ago from a think tank, we heard that there were more people in the history of Canada using food banks and that 33% of those people were children. We have to ask about priorities again, the hierarchy of needs. What needs do we need to look at?
Whether the government believes it or not, one of the things a government responsible for the well-being of its people is supposed to do at a time when people are struggling is to look at ways to help them out. Why is it going to pick a hierarchy of needs of fighter planes, which we have been told we do not need now, that they are not the ones need and that they will not do the job as well as others?
The government promised in 2006 that it would look at a whole lot of real, immediate defence needs, and it has done nothing about them. Let us talk about ice breakers. Let us talk about the three supply ships about which it talked. It is still doing diddly-squat about it.
Let us deal with the immediate problems. I know, as a homeowner, if my roof is leaking and I have the choice between fixing my roof and buying a new car, I will keep my old car for the next two years and fix my roof. It is called priorities. It is called common sense. Most Canadians understand this. I do not understand how these decisions are being made. That is why we are trying to get some very clear answers.
We have hierarchy of needs, timeliness of needs and the most urgent needs. What do we need now to take care of business now, so we can move on and maybe do what we really would like to do down the road? It is the difference between what we need and what we want. Sometimes we have to make choices in bad times between those two.
I know the government wants these pretty little toys to play with. The bottom line is Canadians want the government to wake up, listen and look at the statistics, although I know the government does not really like statistics very much. They tell it things it may not be willing to listen to or it does not want to hear. The government should listen to Canadians and look statistically at unemployment rates and at the increasing number of people on the welfare roles. In my province of British Columbia, every month the number is going up. The government shrugs its shoulders and tells us not to look at it, that it is provincial problem.
I want to talk about the word need. We need to look at the sustainability of health care. The need for core housing is a big problem. We have this hierarchy of needs. We have these immediate needs of Canadians. Yet the government is unable to give us answers as to why it picked this issue as the top of its hierarchy. What about the timing of this? We do not need it now. It can wait for a few years. What are the outcomes of the choices it is going to make?
If the government went to the people with a major poll and asked them whether they wanted F-35s right now or whether they would like the government to look at helping stimulate the economy in a meaningful way, looking at housing and looking at getting people off the food lines, I know what the people would say.