Elsie Wayne

[National Defence, November 4th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, 10 days ago the Minister of National Defence went public with his concerns about his government's defence policy. He described the treatment of our soldiers as “shabby” and he said that we needed more money just to sustain current operations.

Why is the minister facing resistance from his Minister of Finance and cabinet colleagues for more money for the military? Why does the government want to cut the military?

[Supply, November 4th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I want to compliment the Minister of National Defence for going public in Toronto saying that we need more money. I am surprised at the comments of my colleague from the Bloc. I am sure the people from Quebec, particularly those who are in the shipbuilding business at MIL Davie, and from our shipyard in Saint John and Halifax who build ships for our navy would like to work again. When one talks about being in poverty, the 4,000 men, who worked at my shipyard, are part and parcel of the poverty of today.

I am really shocked at what I am hearing today. When it comes the military, as I stated earlier today, those men and women in uniform cannot come here with placards like everyone else, no matter what the subject. They expect their elected members of Parliament to speak out for them.

When it comes to the replacement of the Sea Kings, does the hon. member think that people did not lose their lives? A pilot from outside my city lost his life in a Sea King. His father came to me and said, “Please get some new helicopters for our people. Give them the tools to do their job”.

How could a member of our defence committee not be in favour of giving more money to our military? It is a number one urgent matter right now with what happened on September 11. If those attacks ever come to Canada, he will have a difficult time answering those questions.

[Supply, November 4th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, the Auditor General and defence analysts have suggested that the operations budget of the CF faces severe shortfalls. The minister has agreed that there is a need. He stated it unequivocally when he spoke to the Toronto Board of Trade.

I am sure the minister knows whether or not the members of his cabinet are supporting him or not. Can we get money into the next budget for the military so we can look after not just Sea Kings, submarines and everything else, but ensuring that military personnel have the quality of life they need?

[Supply, November 4th, 2002]

moved:

That this House condemn the government for continuing to overstretch our military personnel and call on the government to increase spending more than is currently planned, as the Canadian Forces need more money simply to continue operating in a sustainable way.

Mr. Speaker,I will be splitting my time with the right hon. member for Calgary Centre.

Ten days ago at a meeting of the Toronto Board of Trade, the Minister of National Defence stated “With those brave young Canadians who I met in Afghanistan firmly in the back of my mind, I say to you that it is simply wrong that we treat in a shabby way those of our fellow citizens who risk their lives for us”.

That statement was made nine years to the day that I was elected to this House and it is without question as honest an assessment of the government's record as I have ever heard. A concession by the Minister of National Defence that we were mistreating our armed forces personnel would be noteworthy in and of itself, but the minister used the same occasion to call for an increase in our defence spending.

He argued that although the government had used its most recent budget to increase defence spending, it was simply not enough. We in the Progressive Conservative caucus could not agree more with the minister.

I would ask that the House and those in it do not confuse my anger with surprise, for the sad reality is that the revelations made by the minister in his remarks were not new. They are the same disheartening facts that have been uncovered by the Standing Committee on National Defence and Veterans Affairs and its companion committee in the other place.

They are the same facts known to our American neighbours and NATO allies. They are the same facts known to anyone who has looked at a newspaper or watched the news in the last five years.

It was however, the first time that a Minister of National Defence has acknowledged and confirmed the government's record on defence. I for one applaud the minister for his remarks. We should all recognize the personal courage it must have taken to prepare and deliver a speech that exposed the inadequacies of the government in which he serves. I hope that the minister's integrity in this regard will inspire others in the cabinet to act accordingly.

In the fiscal year 1993-94 our national defence budget was $12 billion but by 1998-99 that total was down to a mere $9.4 billion, a reduction of 22%. This was despite the fact that in the same period the operational tempo of our armed forces, that is to say that ratio of time spent by our military in deployed missions, rose from a mere 6.2 to 23.2, an increase of almost 400%.

In short, for close to 10 years we have asked our military men and women to do significantly more with dramatically less. If we care to calculate our military spending as a percentage of our national gross domestic product, a non-partisan conservative calculation would show that it hovers between 1.1% and 1.2% of Canada's GDP. This is the third worst record in all of NATO, only better than Iceland and Luxembourg, two nations with populations of roughly 275,000 and 450,000 respectively.

When any department, let alone one as important as the Department of National Defence, has had its budget reduced by roughly a quarter in a period of only a few years, its ability to honour commitments will be necessarily affected.

It saddens me to report to the House that our military is no longer able to conduct the type and kind of missions that it could in the recent past. The equipment that we have in our arsenal has been allowed to age and deteriorate to the point where it is no longer reliable or interoperable with other allied forces.

Worse still, our men and women in uniform are being abused to the point where too many of them are coming home from missions suffering from illnesses ranging from exhaustion to post traumatic stress disorder. This is the “shabby” treatment that the minister himself condemns.

We are fortunate in this country that we have courageous men and women who are willing to put their lives at risk to defend both this country and the values we espouse. They are nothing short of national heroes and they must be treated accordingly.

I am proud that in my time in this place my voice has been one of those in the chorus of voices calling out for the government to make a significant reinvestment in our military.

Prior to the tragic attacks of September 11, 2001, those of us asking for more defence spending were called alarmists. We were told that in the post-cold war world there was no need for Canada to maintain a robust military. How wrong they were and we all know it.

The terrorist attacks on New York and Washington revealed a sinister new threat to the globe. They demonstrated in the cruelest manner possible that we continue to live in a dangerous world and that we must always be vigilant in defence of our people.

The systematic dismantling of our military was a serious mistake and it remains a serious mistake. I fear that the consequences to Canadians could be deadly. Canadian blood has already been shed in the war on terrorism, first in the U.S. and later in Afghanistan. This is not some foreign conflict in which we have no interest. This is a Canadian fight, one in which we have a vested interest. By not doing our share of the work, by not lifting our share of the burden, we are both undermining our international alliances and dishonouring more than 100 years of military heritage.

Our mission is clear. We have a continuing obligation to fight alongside our allies abroad and defend our citizens here at home, but as the minister himself indicated, our Canadian armed forces are no longer in a position to do both with what we have given them. Again, to quote the minister, “The Canadian Forces need more money simply to continue operating as they are today in a sustainable way”. I would agree with that sentiment, but would take it even one step further. Without a meaningful and immediate reinvestment in our military, our national security is and remains at risk.

I know that some of my colleagues on the government benches will rise today and say that it is not just a money problem and that merely throwing money at it will not solve the problems. For the record, let me just say that I agree wholeheartedly with that. The government's problem is as much a problem with priorities. It is prepared to put everything ahead of national defence and national security. It is prepared to invest millions in other schemes, but when the military comes asking, the vault door seems to be shut in its face.

Moreover, the government should be condemned for how it wastes money: $500 million to cancel the EH-101 contract to replace our antique Sea King helicopters; $750 million to purchase used submarines that our sailors refuse to use now because the government refused to invest the money needed to refit and repair them; $36 million to get the Americans to taxi our supplies back from Afghanistan because we do not have the airlift and sealift capacity to do it ourselves; $65 million for a pilot training program that does not train pilots. The list goes on and on.

I have often told the House that our men and women in uniform do not have the choice to come to Parliament Hill, as so many other groups do, to protest the unjust cuts to the military's budget. They cannot come up here with placards to voice their concerns about their living arrangements, the food they receive on missions, or the tattered state of the combat uniforms given to them. The problem is that the government sees their silence as satisfaction when in truth it is only out of respect for the uniforms they wear and the people in Canada whom they serve.

I am convinced that if the government were to allow its members to vote as they saw fit on today's motion, there would not be a single vote cast against it. Many in the House have received letters from families of peacekeepers abroad worried that they do not have enough food and worried that they do not have the appropriate camouflage for the environment in which they are serving.

I do not know whether the Minister of National Defence showed a draft copy of his speech to the Prime Minister before he delivered it, but I do know if the minister gave any warning to the PMO that he would be criticizing government policy, it would not have sat well.

I cannot answer the question of the former finance minister whom he knows in the PMO. All I know is that the government has betrayed its best citizens to the point where even the minister responsible will not stand for it any longer. All I know is that the mistreatment of our armed forces personnel has gotten so bad that the minister himself has now said it is wrong.

Some 60 years ago, my brothers went to war for Canada. They did so because in their hearts they knew that it was their duty to fight for king and country. We now live in an age where the single greatest threat to the Canadian armed forces is the government.

When we wrote this motion, we did so using much of the same language that was used by the minister, except for a couple of words.

To the members on the government benches, I can only say that to vote against the motion, they vote against the expert opinion of the Minister of National Defence himself. If they vote against the motion, they vote against the men and women in our armed forces. If they vote against the men and women of the armed forces, they vote against Canada.

[Petitions, October 23rd, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I wish to present to the House a petition with 235 names calling upon Parliament to immediately enact family law legislation which incorporates a presumption of equal shared parenting and children having a voice in divorce proceedings that affect them and which is in the best and complete interests of children and incorporates their rights as decreed by the United Nations.

[National Defence, October 21st, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, between 1942 and 1946, the Department of National Defence and the National Research Council experimented on Canadian soldiers by exposing them to the worst chemical agents, including mustard gas, at CFB Suffield in Alberta. Now 60 years later those brave soldiers are suffering from a wide range of health problems linked back to those tests.

Is the Minister of National Defence prepared to compensate these men or will the government force them to go through another costly legal battle on behalf of Canadian veterans?

[Resumption of Debate on Address in Reply, October 9th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask the hon. member if he feels that the decriminalization of marijuana would make it more accessible for our young people? In my opinion, it paints a picture for our young people that there is nothing wrong with it. However I did a research paper on that, and I did it out of Berkeley university. The research shows that when people smoke their first marijuana cigarette, it enters the brain cells and stays for nine days. Of course, smoking it more often creates a major problem.

Does the member know whether smoking marijuana first can lead to heavier drugs? Does the member feel that we should decriminalize it or make it a little tougher for those who give young people marijuana free until they get them hooked, then sell it to them after they are hooked? I think we have a major problem, if we go along with decriminalizing marijuana.

[Resumption of Debate on Address in Reply, October 9th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I have a question for the hon. member. I know there was mention of the infrastructure program. Back in Saint John, New Brunswick, which is my riding, we have the Point Lepreau nuclear power plant, which needs to be refurbished. I think it will take over $400 million to refurbish it. New Brunswick Power has said it does not have the money. AECL, Atomic Energy of Canada, came to Fredericton, New Brunswick, for a dinner. It needs some money. AECL said that nuclear power has to stay. When we are looking at Kyoto and the environment, nuclear power and natural gas are of course priorities.

Does the member agree that the government, through that infrastructure program or some other program, should be funding the refurbishing of the nuclear power plant to keep it going in Saint John, New Brunswick?

[Resumption of Debate on Address in Reply, October 9th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I wish to thank the hon. member for his question. I had the distinct pleasure of going to British Columbia. While I was there I went to the naval base. They took me there to show me the houses and the living conditions of those men and women. It was pitiful. Do members know that they were going to the food bank with their children? And here is the government saying to them that it is going to raise their rent. The same thing has happened over in Nova Scotia. I was over there as well, at the base, where people there said “We live in quarters here that are not fit for our families”. Then they turn around and the government wants to raise their rent. Glory be, there is no way the government should be raising their rent and there is not a Canadian who is in favour of that for our men and women in our military.

In Nova Scotia at the base they wanted to have a counselling centre. Fathers, such as those in Afghanistan, are gone for many months and children are without their daddies, or their mothers, whoever is in uniform. So they wanted a counselling centre there. They were going to bring in a Catholic priest and a Protestant minister to help counsel the families. Do members know that the men and women had to go out and raise the money themselves? The government would not give them anything for their counselling centre. That is a shame and a disgrace.

[Resumption of Debate on Address in Reply, October 9th, 2002]

Yes, it is embarrassing.

Those men and women cannot come up here and protest. They cannot say a word. They have tried. I have talked to them personally and privately and they are truly worried.

If the Prime Minister wanted to leave in February 2004 and he wanted to leave a legacy, he could have left the best legacy for him and for the government than any other government by putting the needed billions of dollars into the throne speech so that our men and women would be looked after and so that they would have the tools they needed to look after us, our children, our grandchildren and everybody else in Canada. It is a serious situation and one we must address.