Madam Speaker, I am pleased to speak to a truly vital issue this evening. Over the past nine years, a number of yellow flags have been raised by our NATO partners, members of the Canadian Armed Forces and the defence industry. Now, our number-one defence partner, the United States of America, has raised a huge red flag.
The U.S. government has had enough of potential threats to its citizens' safety originating in Canada. It has had enough of Canada always trying to avoid paying its fair share in terms of military obligations. It obviously thinks it is a shame it does not have a serious partner to work with.
Canada is in this crisis situation because of the Prime Minister's foolishness. Members on this side of the House have brought these issues to the Prime Minister's attention many times. Maybe this time, he will do something. There are so many things I could bring up this evening to demonstrate just how incompetent this Prime Minister and his ministers have been. I will focus on the disaster this government caused at National Defence.
Where do we start? For nine years, we have been criticizing the Liberals for making big promises on this file, on defence, and then failing to keep their promises every time. They keep deferring spending and deferring funds for goods and equipment to future years.
Significantly, the Liberals have also changed the rules of the game when it comes to defence spending. According to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, reported defence spending increased by approximately $7 billion in 2017 over the previous fiscal year, but only because of NATO's more flexible guidance on what constitutes defence spending. As a result, Canada's numbers on spending came to include measures not previously considered defence spending. Veterans' benefits and expenditures on the Canadian Coast Guard, peacekeeping and DND IT support are now part of Canada's NATO calculation.
In other words, the Liberals created $7 billion in new spending out of thin air. As a result, any comparison between the current government's spending and that of the Harper government is like comparing apples to oranges. Canada is now the only NATO country that is not meeting its two investment pledges: to invest at least 2% of its GDP in defence and to invest at least 20% of its defence budget in new equipment and R and D.
The Liberals cut the Canadian Armed Forces' budget by nearly $1 billion, despite their promise not to do so, and yet the 2023 budget specifically promised to exempt the Canadian Armed Forces from the government's spending review. Let us remember that, in budget 2023, the current President of the Treasury Board, the former defence minister, asked all departments to start being more careful and making budget cuts, but there was an exemption for the Canadian Armed Forces. Despite all this, $1 billion was cut from the Department of National Defence's budget.
Last year, the former chief of the defence staff, Wayne Eyre, said it was impossible to cut almost $1 billion from the defence budget without that having an impact. He went on to say that it was an issue the department was facing, and that he had had a very difficult session with the commanding officers of the different branches as they tried to explain this to their people. Those people knew the security situation was deteriorating around the world, so trying to explain it to them was very difficult.
According to the Public Accounts of Canada, the Liberals have left billions of dollars in defence funding unspent since 2015—