Mr. Speaker, I listened with some amusement to my colleague, the critic for the Conservative Party on this matter. He started off his question by saying “we all know”. Well, I do not know who the “we” is. Maybe he knows, but certainly on this side of the House we, meaning the government, have not cut anything at this point and do not intend to.
He said it is all a code word for cuts. He should know something about cuts because he was a member of a government that ran the national defence budget down from about $22 billion or $23 billion to what it is today, which is about $18.6 billion. Over the course of about a four-year fiscal cycle, Conservatives ran it down about $3.3 billion, so the hon. member certainly does know something about cuts. Possibly when he is concerned about those cuts he should look in the mirror as to what his government did.
His government also was quite artful in its cuts because, over that similar period of time, it lapsed something in the order of $2 billion, and that is money that is not available for future procurements. That is just money, as he rightly says, to go to other priorities, and the Conservatives were very keen for the purposes of this last election to show that they had a bogus balanced budget. In some respects, that bogus balanced budget was put onto the backs of the men and women in uniform in order to be able to get to this magic number that they thought would take them to some sort of electoral nirvana.
Our approach is far different. Our approach is to try to match when funds are available and when the procurement cycle is available, so match those two cycles. It has been a bête noire of all governments that the procurement cycle and the fiscal cycle do not necessarily always match up.
The last budget that was presented by the Minister of Finance actually tried to redress that core problem of matching procurement cycles with fiscal cycles, hence the forwarding of a substantial sum of money, somewhere in the order of about $3 billion, for future procurement. It does not follow that the money is lost to DND. In fact, the Minister of Finance said it is not lost. The Minister of National Defence said it is not lost. The Prime Minister said it is not lost, but there is a concern that the previous government left us in a procurement and fiscal mess.
I want to point out that, since we took government, we have actually allocated $1.6 billion to the Middle East operations over the next three years. This is something that we debated in the House, and those monies have been set aside. We have also allocated $200 million over two years to undertake infrastructure projects at Canadian Forces bases, most of which I assume my hon. colleague would agree with.
We are trying to bring a fiscal cycle into alignment with a procurement cycle for the men and women in uniform, who both he and I agree should have the equipment they need, so that those two cycles will match.