Mr. Speaker, I know what the minister did in uniform, and we are all proud of the work he did. We are not questioning that work; we are questioning his integrity, the embellishment of what he did, what they call “stolen valour”, by taking full credit for an operation on which he had to backtrack.
More important, the parliamentary secretary has failed to mention how the Liberals have created a complete circus out of replacing our tired CF-18 fighter fleet and how they have gone from one extreme, saying they will not buy the F-35 to they might have an open and fair competition, which we need to have happen right now. They invented the idea of an imaginary capability gap. Again, that has nothing to do with the actual requirements of the Canadian Armed Forces for the last 30 years and how we fulfill our NATO and NORAD responsibilities in the protection of Canadian sovereignty.
He failed to mention that the Liberals were not planning to buy the Super Hornets now because of the Boeing-Bombardier fiasco they created and the war of rhetoric going on back and forth between them, Bombardier, and Boeing. He fails to recognize that buying used legacy Hornets from Australia is a waste of time and money when we should be investing right now in an open and fair competition to find the right plane for our pilots, for our aerospace industry, and for the protection of Canadians.