Mr. Chair, we are looking forward to tonight's committee of the whole as we raise a number of questions and issues surrounding the defence budget and where the government is taking our Canadian Armed Forces and Department of National Defence.
I want to also welcome the support the minister has here tonight, with the deputy minister, the vice-chief of the defence staff, and those in ADM positions. I thank them for supporting the minister tonight and for the work they do in supporting our men and women in uniform.
This has been a rough session for the minister. He has misled Canadians on a number of occasions now. There was the issue of danger pay on Operation Impact for everybody who was stationed in Kuwait. It took our efforts as the opposition to bring to light that some members in the fight against ISIS were being treated unfairly. The government instead doubled down and then embarrassed itself and ultimately had to correct the problem.
We also know the capability gap surrounding our CF-18s is an imaginary one. We are going to dive into that more completely.
We also want to talk about the continued stand-down by the government in pulling resources out of Iraq and Kuwait that were in support of our troops who are fighting ISIS and in support of our allies, and of course about how the minister has misled the House in saying our allies were happy when we pulled our CF-18s out of the fight.
We also have that situation again, with the government pulling our Auroras out of the fight against ISIS and leaving the heavy lifting to our NATO allies, who have had to move in AWACs.
We have the famous architect issue. That report came up over Operation Medusa, and the minister has apologized for it.
This budget is nothing to celebrate either. There have been $12 billion in cuts made in two consecutive budgets by the government. The finance minister has said that the Department of National Defence is appropriately provisioned, but the minister himself has said that there need to be significant investments going forward in the DPR.
The budget cuts that we are seeing right now are decreasing the amount of training that our troops can do and the amount that they can do in maintaining readiness to do the jobs that we call upon them to do.
I am going to first talk about the defence policy review. It is being rolled out, but it is much delayed. Originally the minister said that we would have the defence policy review in front of us by the end of last year; here we are, six months down the road, and we still have not seen it. The government has said that it will be released on June 8, and we are going to be looking at it.
I want to dive into that a bit, because we have already seen a number of shell games going on with the budget. In the cuts in this budget, the government has taken $8.5 billion and punted it down the road for up to 20 years. We were able to find in the budget that there was some re-profiling, as the minister likes to call it, or stuff that lines up better with our fiscal framework, but there is still $5.6 billion of shifted funds that are not accounted for, and we need to find out where those funds are going. We know there is some deferred spending coming from LAV modernization and some funding for the fixed-wing search and rescue planes that was moved down to better fit when the planes are being delivered, but we want to know if the shell games are going to continue.
We want to know whether or not there is going to be adequate funding in the budget to support the defence policy review or if the minister is going to defer all of that funding until after the next election. One thing of which the defence minister is the architect is the defence policy review, but can he guarantee us that the funding is going to be there, or is it going to be, as Dave Perry said, underfunded and under-ambitious?