Bill Blaikie

[Supply, October 21st, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I am from Transcona, but I am also from Missouri, and I will support an integrated policy on the part of the Liberals when I see it and when I see it actually being put into action. I do not see much integration there at the moment at all. I see a foreign defence policy that has been dis-integrated and disintegrating for a long time and which has actually over time reduced the perception of Canada in the world as a real player.

I think we have been living off our laurels for a long time in the world. It takes other countries a long time to figure out that Canada is not actually spending what it used to spend on overseas development aid. It is not uncommon if we travel to have people be very complimentary about Canada. I think that is good and I think there is still a lot to be complimentary about in terms of the role that Canadians play in the world as individuals.

But the role that the Canadian government plays in the world has increasingly become smaller and smaller, not just in terms of its capacity to make Canadian troops available where they are needed in certain situations, but in terms of development and diplomacy and its role in terms of disarmament.

I noticed that the parliamentary secretary talked about defence, diplomacy and development. Now I had only been up on my feet a minute or two before and I had also talked about the need for disarmament, nuclear disarmament, but the parliamentary secretary did not mention that. Maybe that was an oversight or maybe it tells us something about where the government is at: that it has actually given up on that.

We have not given up on that, so I say to the parliamentary secretary, when the Liberals come forward with an integrated policy and show that they mean it and that they actually intend to do something about it, instead of just having photo ops with Bono and pretending to be the kind of country we used to be, then maybe they will get some support from us, but not before.

[Supply, October 21st, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, when it comes to Liberal defence policy, there is much to criticize. Of course the first thing that comes to mind is the absolute scandal of how long it has taken, and the way in which it was dealt with, to replace the Sea King helicopters. I was here in the House when the debate about the EH-101 helicopters took place. I think there were legitimate positions to be taken on either side of that debate, but it also had a political dimension in the negative sense of what it means to be political.

We were critical of that purchase at the time, but I can tell the House, at least from my point of view, that if I had thought, by killing that helicopter contract, that 11 years later Canadian Forces personnel would still be flying around in Sea Kings and there would be 30 hours of maintenance or something like that for every hour in the air, I might have had a different point of view. I had no idea that even Liberals would do that. There is always a long lead time with Liberals. I think it was something like 42 years between the first promise on medicare and when they kept it, but I thought with helicopters they might be able to do better than that.

But here we are 11 years later and we still do not have those replacement helicopters. That is an absolute scandal. I am sure it is the internal politics of the Liberal Party that got in the way, as so many other things have been obstructed by the internal politics of the Liberal Party: who is going to get the contract, which friend of who is going to make the money off this particular thing, and on and on it goes. It is not just when it comes to advertising and sponsorship scandals that internal Liberal Party politics get in the way of things.

However, it is not just the Sea Kings. It is also the way in which the Liberals have treated the armed forces, both the civilian and the military personnel in the armed forces. I think of ASD, alternative service delivery. It sounds really nice. It sounds like something good is happening.

What was happening, of course, was that people who were unionized and being paid decent wages to be the civilian part of the military family on a long term basis were laid off and gotten rid of so that others, or perhaps even the same people, could be hired back on the next day by firms that had the previous service contracted out to them, such that people could come back and do their old jobs for half of what they were being paid before. Probably the person who ran the company the service was contracted out to had some relationship with the military or perhaps was a retired military person or someone like that.

On and on it goes in regard to the way in which ASD was used, allegedly to save money but in a way that showed contempt for the loyalty and the quality of service that had been provided to the Canadian armed forces over the years by their civilian personnel.

Another good example of what has been wrong is what has happened to our reserves, our Canadian reserve army. I have never heard anyone, in 25 years in the House, ever get up and say they were against expanding the reserves. In fact, for 25 years everyone has been for expanding the reserves. There has been no political price to pay by any government for expanding the reserves, yet it has never happened. Why is that? Partly, I think, it is because the regular army itself stands in the way of expanding the reserves.

Our reserves have been allowed to deteriorate. If we go into some of our armouries, we see that it is the only place where we can walk in and feel that time has stood still. I used to go into Minto armouries in the 1960s when I was a cadet and when I belonged to the Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders. When I go into armouries today, nothing has changed.

There are some things I do not want to change, but there are other things that are not working anymore. I asked some of the people down there about it and I was told, for example, that they cannot use the rifle ranges. What is an armoury without a rifle range? And when they do get a rifle range, they do not have bullets. They have no ammunition. One cannot practise and learn how to use a rifle when someone says, “Here are your two bullets for this month”. It just does not work. It just does not cut it.

This is the kind of indignity that our armed forces have been subjected to under the reign of the Liberal Party, so I am glad to see that in the throne speech there is a commitment to proceed with the third stage of the expansion of the Canadian army reserve. I hope that actually goes ahead.

The other thing I want to comment on again has to do with the Tory motion. I talked about the dichotomy between combat operations or combat capability in peacekeeping, but in the same motion the Tories also seem to set up a dichotomy between the creation of this new peacekeeping brigade that the government has said it wants to create, this increase of 5,000, and combat capabilities. I think it is too soon to judge whether or not what the government has in mind is creating a peacekeeping brigade that does not have combat capabilities. If that is what it is doing, then that brigade is not going to be of much use to the international community.

Ultimately, our vision is of a Canadian armed forces that is a meaningful resource, at the ready, that can get there when it needs to get there, with the equipment it needs, to be a meaningful resource to the United Nations or in other international situations where the Canadian government deems it appropriate, not as an interoperable arm of U.S. foreign and defence policy, which is what the United States wanted us to be when they went into Iraq.

It was good that the Liberal government of that day decided not to go into Iraq, but these ad hoc decisions, even when they are good decisions, are no replacement for an overall foreign policy which integrates the need for a strong Canadian armed forces that gives us respect in the world and makes us a meaningful resource to the international community but is integrated with an appropriate development policy, because ultimately good international development policies are a form of prevention.

The government likes to talk about the right to protect, but there is also an obligation to prevent situations from becoming the kinds of situations where we have to go in and protect people. We can do that by having the kind of development policies we used to have. We could do that by spending more money on development instead of spending less money on development, which is what has happened over the years with the Liberal Party. I have talked about defence, development, and diplomacy. The external affairs department has been cut back and does not have the resources it used to have.

We also need concerted work on disarmament, on getting rid of nuclear weapons, number one. We had an opportunity after the cold war to get rid of nuclear weapons. We have blown that opportunity, but it is never too late to refocus the world on the need to eliminate nuclear weapons altogether and other weapons of mass destruction. That means going after them where they are, not where they are not, in Iraq.

[Supply, October 21st, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the hon. member for Saint-Jean for his strong presentation on the need to engage in war only as a last resort, and for his commitment to a peaceful world.

I welcome the opportunity to speak to the motion today. Defence is certainly on the minds of Canadians as a result of the tragedy that occurred on the HMCS Chicoutimi . There seems to be a growing consensus in the country that something has been wrong with government support for the military in the past, although there may not be agreement as yet on how we remedy whatever was wrong, because we may not even agree on what kinds of support we are lacking for our military. Nevertheless, there seems to be a growing consensus. If I might put it in somewhat Churchillian terms: Never have so few been increasingly asked to do so much more with less and less resources. It seems to me that this is the view so many Canadians. Even members on the government side have come to realize that perhaps with the best of intentions, fiscal and otherwise, the men and women of the Canadian armed forces have been put in a position where they are being asked to do the work of Canada abroad, in terms of peacekeeping and peace making and other international efforts, and that they increasingly do not feel they have the resources to do that.

There may be grounds for reallocation of resources within the Department of National Defence. Certainly many would make the argument that DND is top heavy and that a lot of money is spent on senior bureaucrats, both military and civilian. There may be room for reallocation, but I also think, and I think all parties agree on this, we are open to the argument that there actually needs to be more money spent in an absolute sense on our armed forces if they are to do the kinds of things we want them to do.

However, what is it we want them to do? That is where we might disagree with each other as parties. I do not see that as partisanship in a bad sense. We need to have a debate in the country and there will be differing opinions. That is not partisan, that is the nature of democracy. What is partisan in the pejorative sense is when we exaggerate the case or when we continue to use examples that we know are no longer relevant. The case arose earlier on the floor today about the Canadians arriving in Afghanistan with the wrong uniforms, I thought was sufficiently put to rest by the military itself when it appeared before the committee sometime ago. I do not think it actually serves the debate very well to keep bringing those kinds of things up. That is a form of partisanship we could do without.

Sometimes we see parties agreeing with each other. We saw that yesterday. We have had a lot of back and forth between Liberals and Conservatives on the floor here today. One would think they do not agree on anything. It is quite the contrary. Yesterday, in the foreign affairs committee they agreed to combine together to defeat a motion supported by the NDP, and presumably the Bloc, to hold public hearings on the question of whether Canada should participate in the national ballistic missile defence system that George Bush is proposing for the United States and is proposing Canada be a part of that.

Sometimes appearances can be deceiving. Somehow there is this great divide between the Liberals and the Conservatives. However, when it comes to the single most important decision that Canada will have to make in the near future with respect to foreign policy and defence, they are one. They are one not only in substance, but they are one in process. They are one in substance because it has been clear from the beginning that the leader of the Conservative Party is in favour of Canadian participation in ballistic missile defence. If he has changed their position, members on the other side are free to get up and tell me that this is no longer the case and that they are now on the fence or something like that. However, they are certainly not against it.

When it comes to process, as I said, yesterday the Liberals and the Conservatives were as one in the committee on foreign affairs in denying members of the Canadian public the opportunity to come before that committee throughout the country and express their opinion on whether Canada should be part of this.

If the government has another view of how Canadians are to be consulted on this it should say so. It agreed to a motion, an amendment to the throne speech, that said this decision would be taken only after a vote in the House of Commons and after all the relevant public information was available. To whom will this be available? How will Canadians have an opportunity to react to that information, presuming that it is adequate and that we do in fact have all the relevant information? Will it be a kind of in-house exercise, as so far the international policy review of the government has been, or will we actually give Canadians a chance to express themselves on this? We have the time. There is no rush. We could do this.

With respect to the Conservative motion itself, it says that Liberal policy is seriously out of date. This is true. The 1994 white paper is obviously out of date. I do not think even the Minister of National Defence would want to rise in this place today and say that it is an adequate description of the world and an adequate description of what Canada's role in that world should be.

It may be that the 1994 white paper was never an adequate description of what the world was like, but that is more for a debate on the historical side. However, it is true that we now live in a completely different world, and some people have already alluded to this. We certainly live in the post September 11, 2001, world. We live with new geopolitical realities, with the United States having emerged as the one global superpower. We live in a unipolar world instead of the bipolar world of the cold war. We live in a world where terrorism is abundant, terrorism of many different kinds, not only the kind that we find in organizations like al-Qaeda. We live in a world of failed states and proliferation of nuclear weapons.

We still do not know the location of all that nuclear material that existed in the former Soviet Union. Where is it all? There are some attempts by Canada and other countries to decommission nuclear facilities and weapons and find out where that stuff is or ensure it does not fall into the wrong hands, but there is all kinds of it all over the world and we do not know where it is. Even though we are back from the nuclear abyss in terms of the confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States of America, it could also be true that we live in a much more dangerous world in terms of the possible use of nuclear weapons by all kinds of non-state actors, the names of which we do not even know, as well as their locations.

We also live in a much more dangerous world because we now live in a world of pre-emptive war doctrines, the doctrine adopted by George Bush. I believe it was on September 27, 2002 when he made a speech and said that from here on in the United States would act pre-emptively whenever it had a belief, and it could be the wrong belief, that someone is about to attack the U.S. This changes the whole strategic environment in a way in which the Canadian government has yet to respond. We need to respond to that because we are so involved with the United States in terms of the defence of North America and in terms of its expectations as to what we will do as a neighbour.

Of course we have a changing world in terms of the increasing polarization between rich and poor, not only within countries but between countries as a result of 20 years of globalization, free trade, deregulation and all the other things that have contributed to an increasingly unstable planet in social, environmental and economic factors, not to mention global warming.

Not all things are obviously related to defence, but I just want to set out what I think is the changing world to which we need to respond.

With respect to the Conservative motion, it is rather odd. It sets out, perhaps unintentionally, a dichotomy between peacekeeping and combat operations that I have often heard Conservatives criticize. In other words, it is not uncommon to hear Conservatives and others, and quite legitimately so, point out that peacekeeping is not what it was when we went to Cyprus. Often, it is not like there is a peace to keep. There is a peace to make and to enforce. Peacekeeping has morphed over the years into peacemaking and peace enforcing and often that involves our troops in combat situations.

Therefore, this motion, one could claim, seems to have been drafted without any knowledge, or at least without having that knowledge impact on the drafting of the motion, of situations like the Medak pocket, where Canadian peacekeepers actually had to have combat capability in order to defend themselves and to defend others.

I find it somewhat ironic that we have a motion from the Conservative side of the House which appears to reinforce this dichotomy, because it is important from the point of view of the NDP as well as from the point of view of many, I would assume, that our peacekeepers do have this combat capability, because they are going to need it in the increasingly difficult situations that we send them into.

Peacekeeping is not what it used to be. That means that our forces, when they are sent into these situations, need to have that capability. That has been demonstrated in a concrete way on a number of occasions.

Perhaps that is what the parliamentary secretary meant when he said, although I think it is a quote he probably does not want to distribute, that “peacekeeping is war by another name”. I thought that was an interesting thing for the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of National Defence to say. Perhaps the Minister of National Defence could elaborate on that at some point as to what his assistant meant.

I see smiles breaking out over there, so perhaps they will want to have some research done on exactly what was meant.

[Supply, October 21st, 2004]

Madam Speaker, apropos of the previous exchange, I was the person who asked that question in the Department of National Defence about the uniforms. I was persuaded at the time, and continue to be persuaded, that the answer was adequate and it was not a question of the officer at the time saying what he thought he should say. It is a good example of how certain incidents get blown up out of proportion and in the end do not serve the debate about defence spending very well.

My question for the deputy leader is this. His leader before him and he himself referred to the collaborative defence of North America. Could he tell us, because there was a paucity of comment on this in both speeches, about the position of the Conservative Party with respect to national missile defence? Perhaps while he is at it he could tell us, because so often in the past it has argued for public input, why the Conservative Party opposed the idea of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs holding public hearings into whether Canada should participate in this particular anti-missile defence system.

[Health, October 18th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I am beginning to understand why we did not get anything for him when we traded him to the Liberals.

The Minister of Health said that pharmacare was years away, that they could not afford it, and yet they promised a national pharmacare program during the election. Presumably they did not know they had the kind of surplus they have today. Why can they not afford pharmacare today when they have a surplus that is way larger than it was when they promised it?

[Health, October 18th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Health. The Minister of Health will recall that as leader the Prime Minister in the recent election campaigned against the Tories because he said he was against credit card medicine. We now have credit card medicine in Montreal.

What is the Minister of Health doing about it and how does he reconcile the fact that he is not doing anything with the things the Liberals said during the election campaign?

[National Defence, October 13th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of National Defence, who was asked a question by his former House leader about a report on the subs that existed prior to the purchase. The question was whether or not the government was aware of that report and whether or not it had presumably read it.

The parliamentary secretary remembers when he was in the opposition the frustration he experienced at not getting answers to his questions. Will he either answer the question or tell us if he was made to drink some kind of potion before becoming a Liberal which certainly disabled him from recognizing a question and knowing how to answer it?

[National Defence, October 8th, 2004]

I didn't ask you a question, I asked the Prime Minister.

[National Defence, October 8th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I am glad to see that the Minister of National Defence has backed off the idea that there is no role for parliamentarians in reviewing the sub program because the other day he said it was strictly a matter for military inquiry.

I would ask the Prime Minister if he might also have a change of mind with respect to addressing the democratic deficit.

I say to the right hon. Prime Minister, if he is so convinced that there is no weaponization of space involved in the national missile defence program, why will he not allow members of his caucus to show that they are equally so convinced and allow them to vote on any decision taken by the Prime Minister?

[National Defence, October 6th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of National Defence. It seems odd to us that at the same time as the government is contemplating the enormous expense of being involved in George Bush's national missile defence plan, we do not seem to have the money to properly and safely outfit our submariners. Therefore, at the same time as we express concern about the crew of the HMCS Chicoutimi , I want to ask the Minister of National Defence this. Is there an intention on the part of the government to go after the British government for having sold us this equipment in the first place and to go after it for the costs associated with what are obviously inferior submarines?