Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin by informing you that I will be sharing my time with my former leader, our colleague from Saint-Laurent—Cartierville.
The motion currently before the House, which my colleagues spoke to earlier this morning, lays out some very basic principles of parliamentary democracy. As the House leader for the New Democratic Party correctly noted a few minutes ago, this is about the ability of elected representatives to have information to base our decisions on as important matters as votes in the House that often involve the spending of billions of dollars of taxpayers' money.
The government has been one of the most secretive governments in Canadian history. Many times we have seen its efforts to withhold or manipulate freedom of information or the access to information process. They have stonewalled parliamentary committees. They have even written manuals on how to disrupt committees, if at some point they see a committee headed in a direction that they as government members do not like or, probably more likely, which some junior assistant in the Prime Minister's office does not like as he watches his television in the Langevin Building. They have gone to a great lengths to withhold information from the Canadian people and their elected representatives in the House.
Therefore, this motion once again seeks to require the government to do what constitutionally and democratically it should want to do, and that is to make available accurate, reliable information to parliamentarians and Canadians on matters as important as the spending of billions and billions of dollars.
The motion seeks in particular to obtain the necessary information with respect to the irresponsible borrowing of money to cut corporate taxes for the largest, most profitable corporations in the country, and also with respect to the justice agenda, which the government wants to trumpet all the time but for which it refuses to even identify the cost associated with many of these regressive and failed American policies.
Another area that is of great concern to us is the government's continuing refusal to make public information with respect to another very important expenditure, its proposed expenditure for the acquisition of the F-35 stealth bombers. With the amount of money involved, these things should not be called stealth fighters but “wealth fighters”. In fact they are more likely to be “wealth bombers”.
The government has, on every occasion, given half information or information that is unreliable, or, in many cases, it has refused outright to give members of Parliament information relating to the expenditure of the largest procurement in military history. It is proposing to do this massive military procurement on a sole-source basis without any public competition whatsoever.
The Conservatives announced their intention to purchase 65 fighter planes without a bidding process. They made the announcement in the middle of the summer, hoping to avoid criticism. They did not do so when Parliament was sitting last spring. They decided to wait and announce the purchase when the members were no longer in Ottawa and Parliament was not in a position to ask any serious questions.
Even worse, the Conservatives refuse to make public any of the details regarding their purported study and why they chose the F-35, when we know that they did not even take the time or make the effort to seriously look at other options before deciding to purchase the F-35, probably for ideological reasons.
The Conservatives refuse to reveal the actual cost of this choice, this airplane. It was initially valued at about $50 million per plane. Then it went up to $70 million per plane and now it has gone up to $90 million per plane, and it just keeps going up. They refuse to come clean to Canadians regarding the price of that fighter jet.
The Conservatives have also refused to tell us what the real in-service support cost will be. In-service support for 20 years costs at least as much as the acquisition price of the airplane. All of the experts have been clear that at minimum we can double the acquisition price to see the 20-year in-service support cost.
The Conservatives try to make us believe that the in-service support cost for the F-35 will in fact be less than the acquisition cost, which they have evaluated, without any proof or information, at $9 billion. They are pretending that the in-service support would add another $7 billion, for a total price tag of $16 billion.
On this side of the House, we have not been able to get any information as to how the government arrived at these numbers. The member for Vancouver South asked the Parliamentary Budget Officer to look into this matter last spring. We wait with great interest for a report that will hopefully shed some light on the real cost and the real financial impact of both the acquisition and the in-service support.
The government has refused to make public the statement of requirements for the replacement of our CF-18 fighter jets. The Minister of National Defence claimed, in a rather surreal moment at a committee meeting we had to force in September, that the statement of requirements was protected by copyright.
That would make no sense at all if the statement of requirements were drafted by the Canadian Department of National Defence. However, if the statement of requirements were drafted by an American aircraft manufacturer, that might explain why they might claim a copyright privilege on what should in fact be an internal Canadian defence department document.
The government has refused to make that statement of requirements public. The Minister of Public Works and Government Services, at that same committee, admitted that the department had received it, but the government has refused to make that public.
The Conservatives have claimed that the F-35 is the only plane that meets Canada's air force needs. Yet at the defence committee, we heard at least four other aircraft manufacturers say that they currently produced an aircraft that met the only requirements the government has made public in a document they called, the high-level mandatory requirements.
There are four other companies, therefore, that are saying they would be happy to submit to a competitive public process. Based on the only information the government has made public, they believe their aircraft would meet those requirements. That is why the only way to bring clarity and responsibility to this reckless financial process is to have a public competition and allow those companies to tell Canadians and the Government of Canada what they are willing to do, not only for our air force but also for the aerospace industry.
Madam Speaker, as I said, the Conservatives claim they looked at other options. However, they refuse to give us any information about how many times they visited other aerospace companies. We know they went often to Fort Worth, Texas, to visit Lockheed Martin and look at the F-35.
I asked the person responsible for the project, Colonel Burt, to give us those figures. He told us he would let us know how many times they visited Boeing, Eurofighter, Saab and Lockheed Martin. It has been a few months now, and we have not heard anything. The government must be embarrassed that it did not bother looking at any other aircraft.
The Conservatives have been spreading other falsehoods. They are saying that it was the Liberal Party that committed to purchasing that plane in 1997. On the contrary, it was a Liberal government that supported the development of that aircraft, which generated nearly half a billion dollars in economic spinoffs for our aerospace industries. Until 2008, the same Conservative ministers, including Jim Prentice, who was the industry minister at the time, and Michael Fortier, the former public works and government services minister, issued press releases from the Government of Canada confirming that continued participation in the development phase of the aircraft in no way meant that the federal government was committed to purchasing it.
If the government were saying two years ago that continued participation in the development phase of the airplane in no way obliged Canada to buy the plane, then it is surprising to hear the government then stand up to say, “No, it was a Liberal government 14 years ago that made the decision to buy that airplane”. This is another example of the government's inability to come clean with Canadians.
This is really an issue of democracy. If the government wants to spend billions and billions of taxpayers' dollars, it owes it to Canadians to come clean on the real cost and to show, with documents, what it is asking Parliament to vote for.
That is why this motion is so important for Parliament and for democracy.