Mr. Speaker, I am proud to be here as the last speaker at the adjournment proceedings tonight.
I am rising on a question I put to the minister back on May 15 about the defence policy review. At that time, we were waiting and waiting for the defence policy review, which was supposed to be out before Christmas. It finally showed up early in the summer. The interesting thing is that everyone got to see it before parliamentarians. The minister took it down to Washington and showed it to President Trump, and he never actually let us see it. That speaks to the transparency of the Liberal government.
Do members remember sunny ways and that the government was going to be open and transparent and would allow us to see everything? When we requested a briefing on what was going to be in the defence policy report, “Strong, Secure, Engaged”, when it came out, we thought we would get some notice and a couple of hours' briefing to tell us what was in there and how it would be announced to Canadians.
Opposition critics from the Conservatives, the NDP, and the Bloc were told to show up at National Defence for our briefing. We were put in a secure room and had all our devices taken away, of course, which we thought would be fine, because we were going to be presented with the documents and told what was in them. However, we were presented with the documents and given one hour to read through the defence policy, the backgrounders, the press releases, and all the statements by the government ministers involved. We had one hour, and then we were supposed to go out and be able to deal with the media.
To me, that was a failure of being transparent and of working with good will with other parliamentarians and other parties to ensure that we were in a position to actually talk about the defence policy.
After the defence policy was announced, it proved the fact that Canadians do not trust the Liberal government. We have already lived through the decade of darkness. We have already seen the Liberal government take $12 billion in funding away from our troops in two consecutive budgets. It had thrown a lot of procurement into disarray. We saw it pull our CF-18s out of the fight against ISIS. The Liberals did not want to have a combat mission, unfortunately, in Operation Impact. It took forever, dragging its feet, in renewing our Operation Unifier mission in Ukraine.
In the defence policy review the government did, it did not talk extensively about the threats Canada is facing, along with our allies, and because of that, it failed to look at North Korea. It failed to even consider what is happening there today and why we need to be part of a ballistic missile defence program under NORAD.
I am sure the parliamentary secretary is going to get up and say, “Canada is back”. However, if members read the news today, it showed that while the government said it was going to bring in 600 peacekeepers and 150 police officers to go on peacekeeping missions, today we have the smallest UN peacekeeping mission in the history of this country. We have only 88 peacekeepers assigned to UN peacekeeping missions.
That is a failure of the government in not being able to deliver on any of its promises when it comes to our military. The military is not getting the kit it needs on time. All the spending the government has announced has been punted down the road for over two years, until after the next election. That will only happen if there is a budget there to actually do it.
The political will of the government is in question. Canadians and our troops do not trust the Liberals.