Mr. Speaker, it is indeed an honour to rise in adjournment proceedings tonight to address my friend, the parliamentary secretary on national defence, about a question I originally raised on June 8. Here we are a few months later talking about the defence policy review process and the report released to the public by the Minister of National Defence. The concern we raised at that time, and still have, is that although the defence policy has some good things in it, it is under-resourced, and there is a bit of a shell game going on with respect to where the money is going to come from.
The Liberals have cut $12 billion from the defence budget in budget 2016 and budget 2017. There was just under $4 billion cut in budget 2016 and just over $8 billion cut in budget 2017. That has a huge impact on our ability to have a capable force that is ready to deploy to defend Canada's sovereignty, to work with our allies, and to stand up for those who cannot stand for themselves around the world.
As we know, the Liberals have broken a number of promises as they relate to our Canadian Armed Forces, including on peacekeeping. They still have not made any decisions on deploying 600 peacekeeping troops, spending $450 million, and deploying 150 police officers. In fact, under the Liberal government, peacekeeping has dropped to an all-time low of only 88 peacekeepers from Canada participating in United Nations' missions around the world this month. That is something the Liberals should be quite ashamed of, especially with the Minister of National Defence hosting a UN peacekeeping conference in Vancouver on November 14 and 15.
There are some major gaps in the defence policy review the Liberals came out with. First of all, it was done in isolation and was not informed by foreign policy. If we look at the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, when they have done their defence policies, they have done them in collaboration with foreign policy reviews at the same time. What we have are some major shortfalls in the defence policy because of that.
We do not have any plans to replace our submarines. We need to have the ability to protect Canada from approaching threats in our waters, to protect our seaways, and to protect the Arctic, in particular. Submarines are stealthy. Our adversaries have them. Actually, there has been a huge proliferation of submarines.
We still have not been able to get to a point where we are ordering any fighter jets. We are two years into the mandate, and the defence policy is calling for 88 fighter jets, but the Liberals still have not been able to deliver a single fighter jet to replace our aging CF-18s, and the options they are presenting are quite embarrassing.
The Liberals are not matching the NATO aspirational target of spending 2% of GDP on our military. They are getting to 1.4%, and they are doing it through some very creative accounting by stealing some money from Foreign Affairs, stealing some money from the Coast Guard, and stealing money from Veterans Affairs through pensions to build up the budget beyond what it actually is spending on National Defence.
It is time for the Liberals to get serious about actually resourcing our troops properly.