Madam Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for North Island—Powell River.
In the course of debate so far this morning, I have already had a chance to make some of the points I was going to make at the outset of this speech, and I will repeat them at this point. I am very glad to hear that all sides of the House are prepared to support the motion, which does the obvious. It commits us to provide the support Canadian troops need when they are in the field doing difficult and dangerous work.
I am sorry it has become a bit of a political football, but the good part we can take out of that is that we have a commitment from the minister to act, and I hope that has been accepted in good faith on the Conservative side.
What we do internationally as Canadians is almost always part of a larger partnership. I was privileged to be part of the defence committee trip to Washington, D.C. this week. We talked about those partnerships and how those operated. One of the things we accomplished was to remind Americans of the Canadian-American partnership and to let them know there was concern in Canada about the fact that there may be inadvertent damage to Canadian-American defence co-operation and our defence relations by some of the wilder statements that had been made by the President in his campaign, and some of the things that continued to be said. In all good faith, I do not think they were really directed at Canada, but they may have those negative impacts.
Yesterday we had the great privilege of meeting with Senator John McCain, a meeting that went on for quite a long time. I think we managed to get across the fact that we could not allow our existing partnerships to be disrupted by wild talk about America first. Not only is Canada the main export market in trade for 35 states, but also on the defence industries, we have such melded industries where supply chains go back and forth across the border. America first in defence has always meant America co-operating with Canada, and we have to keep that co-operation in place.
We met with Senator Reid, who is the ranking Democrat on the Senate armed services committee. We were able to talk to him about defence jobs that would be lost in his riding if we disrupted the Canada-American defence production relationships by, again, this wild rhetoric about American first on jobs. The production chains are so integrated in Canada and the United States.
We also met with five representatives. I think one of the biggest surprises for them was when we talked about the number of immigrants in Canada and how our foreign born population was much larger than that in the United States. Again, we raised the inadvertent problems sometimes caused for Canadians who wanted to do business in the United States when the United States talked about securing its borders. I have examples from my riding of people involved in the high-tech industry who were born outside of Canada. They are trying to go back and forth to San Francisco to do their business work and they have been affect, I think, inadvertently. I do not think the President really aimed at these people, but he has caused great problems for them.
When we talk about Canadians serving abroad, as we are in this very narrow motion, we have to remember that has always been in a larger partnership, whether it is with the United States, in this case, in the Middle East, or whether it is through the United Nations in other cases, or through NATO.
Part of what we also discussed was the President's very firm insistence on a 2% GDP spending to be a good partner, self-defined by the U.S., in NATO. We were able to point out that when the United States asked Canada, we showed up in force with very professional soldiers. We showed up with people who knew how to do the difficult work they were asked to do.
One of the things we were also trying to get across was that when we talked about the current mission in the Middle East, Canadians had played a very important role in that mission, and that needed to be remembered in this discussion of relationships.
I am casting a bit broadly here because it is important that the House spends more time talking about the importance of defence and the importance of Canada's international role, particularly in this time when the U.S. President's policies are somewhat erratic, not always well thought out, especially when they are expressed in tweets.
It is very important that Canada act as a force for stability. To do that, it is very important that we have Canadian forces ready and available to serve on these international missions. This means having the training available, doing the recruitment needed, having the equipment needed, and having the support for those troops, both in the field and when they come home.
One of the things we heard from the American side is that they sometimes now question, just as they do for their own forces, their readiness. Have we actually spent enough time making sure that our forces are ready to deploy? Do they have the training? Do they have the equipment? Do they have the munitions? Are we able to transport them into the theatre of operations.
We focused on a very narrow part of this today in the motion, which is whether we are providing adequate compensation to those with difficult and dangerous work, but there is the broader question of how well we are preparing Canadians to take on those roles as part of international partnerships.
I was very proud to be part of that delegation. I think we can congratulate ourselves, rightly, in saying that what we did as a committee was represent Canada in Washington, D.C. and not represent the parties we might represent here in the House. The fact that our meeting with Senator McCain was originally scheduled for half an hour, and at that point he said it was an important meeting and extended the meeting for another half hour, indicated the importance of getting our message across to the Americans that this is an important partnership, that we intend to do our bit, and that we intend to show up when asked.
We are going to have to follow that up on our side with a budget that increases military spending. We were able to say that for once in the House we have a consensus among all the parties that we are not spending enough on those readiness functions. We are not spending enough to make sure that our military is properly equipped. There is more work to do here.
I look forward to seeing the Liberal budget and seeing what progress we are going to make toward that goal of 2% of GDP spending, arbitrary though it is.
When it comes to talking to those in my riding who serve, there is still some reluctance among those in the Canadian Forces to talk to me, as an opposition member, about what is going on, but I have to say that the atmosphere has gotten a lot better on those grounds. People do come forward and talk about the gaps they see in preparedness.
We all know, certainly with the submarine deal we had, that it took us a long time to get those submarines ready. We spent an inordinate amount of money preparing them to serve as part of these joint missions, but they are now ready. They can now serve and are now an important part of what we can contribute to those international coalitions and obligations.
The one part I am concerned about and that my party is concerned about is that one of the traditional things we always did as part of these partnerships, and which was very dangerous work, was peacekeeping work. We had a commitment almost a year ago from the minister that Canada would once again take up peacekeeping work in Africa. This would be another case when our troops would clearly be entitled to fair compensation to take on what would be very difficult missions. It is something the Americans are interested in us doing, as they said very clearly to us in the past few days when we were at the Pentagon, the Senate, or the House of Representatives.
There are some things we can do that the Americans cannot do. Some of those things are very difficult and dangerous, but they may be a little less difficult and dangerous for us as Canadians than they would be for Americans. One of those is peacekeeping, because of Canada's lack of an external colonial past. Despite the internal colonial past we have, we did not have colonies abroad. Another of those is the capabilities we have as a bilingual country with the ability to put forward forces that can work in both English and French. It is particularly important to be able to work in French in Africa.
We have to get this right if we are going to ask our members of the Canadian Forces to go do those jobs, which I believe we should ask them to do. We have to make sure they have the training, the equipment, the compensation, and the support in place before we send them to do this difficult work. I guess my disappointment with today's debate is that we are solving the problem of how we compensate them after they are in the field. I do not want to see us do that again in a future mission. I want to see this sorted out. I take the minister seriously that he is going to sort out this problem. I look forward to seeing in his budget whether we have the resources to actually send Canadians to play an important role as a counterweight to the Americans in this difficult and dangerous world.