Geoff Regan

[Strengthening Military Justice in the Defence of Canada Act, December 6th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, you are right that members are given significant leeway. If we were all required to talk only about clauses in a bill that we are debating at any one time, a lot of the comments from both sides of the House would be cut short.

My hon. colleague seems to be upset. He should remember that I started off by saying that we are going to support this bill at second reading. We want it to go to committee to be studied. I am surprised he is so upset. I would think he would want me to finish what I have to say.

Let me finish by quoting what the Chief of the Air Staff said at the time:

The next generation fighter is very high on my list. We know government wants to get to that discussion soon, and we definitely need to get on with the process to get a new fighter. It sounds like a long time away, but as we know, it takes a lot to go through a contracting process and produce a new fighter.

He was clearly talking in future tense. Here was a case at the same time. For the member to say that there was a competition back then that Canada was part of is conduct unbecoming. I do not know if it falls under the military justice procedure, but it certainly ought to.

In June 2008, the Senate passed Bill C-60 in response to a ruling by the Court Martial Appeal Court of Canada in the Trépanier case. The bill addressed some of Justice Lamer's recommendations.

In 2009, the Standing Senate Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs released a report entitled Equal Justice: Reforming Canada’s System of Courts Martial. This report made nine recommendations.

Therefore, we can consider Bill C-41 to be more or less a combination of the Senate's report and Bill C-45, except for the recommendations already addressed by Parliament with Bill C-60.

My colleague from Markham—Unionville will have other comments on this matter, and I look forward to hearing what he has to say. For the time being, I await questions and comments.

[Strengthening Military Justice in the Defence of Canada Act, December 6th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I certainly will, but in this case I am talking about military justice. I am talking about what is conduct unbecoming the government, as a matter of fact, and what justice ought to be. Let us talk about the truth because the Conservatives are afraid of the truth.

The fact is that we had to wait and see what the U.S. announced in relation to the F-35s, but apparently that is good enough for the government even though we were not actually part of that competition. Really, there is no excuse for not having one.

Even the Chief of the Air Staff in 2001, General André Deschamps, was quoted in Canadian Defence Review at the same time he was asked about the JSF. He was asked, “Where is the next generation fighter on your list of priorities?” He said, “The next generation fighter is very high on my list”.

[Strengthening Military Justice in the Defence of Canada Act, December 6th, 2010]

In fact it was an observer, as my hon. colleague from Newfoundland says. That is what it was.

The assistant deputy minister at the time of those occurrences at the turn of the millennium was Alan Williams. He said the reason for joining the JSF program was not the urgency of replacing the F-18s but the potential industrial opportunities that would come from being part of that proposal. Before the government ever made its decision that it would purchase the F-35s, 144 contracts were already awarded, supporting what Mr. Williams was saying.

In relation to the minister's and Prime Minister's claims of there being a past competition, this is what Mr. Williams said:

On October 26, 2001 Edward Aldridge, Under Secretary of Defense—

This is, of course, in the United States:

—announced that Lockheed Martin was the successful candidate over Boeing.

He went on to say:

[W]e were all glued to our TVs at National Defence headquarters awaiting the announcement.

How is it exactly that this was a Canadian competition? How is it there was a competition that Canada was not part of and we had no decision-making role in it whatsoever, but that is good enough for the government?

[Strengthening Military Justice in the Defence of Canada Act, December 6th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, they are the fans of my colleague, the member for Markham—Unionville. I get the impression they are more anxious to hear from him than from me. That is understandable, I suppose. He is an excellent member.

I am pleased to rise in debate today on Bill C-41.

We will vote in favour of this bill at second reading. Military justice must absolutely be updated. However, there are some clauses of the bill that, at first glance, are cause for concern. We would like to take the time to study the bill properly in committee.

In 1998, the Liberal government at the time passed Bill C-25. The purpose of that bill was to update the military justice system, and it included a clause that required the operation of the bill to be reviewed after five years.

The former chief justice of the Supreme Court, the Right Hon. Antonio Lamer, drafted a report containing 88 recommendations, which are the reason why we are debating this bill today.

Unfortunately, since the Conservatives have been in government, there has been little action to address Judge Lamer's recommendations.

In April 2006, the Conservatives introduced Bill C-7 to amend the National Defence Act. However, it was never brought to the House of Commons for debate. A year and a half later, the Prime Minister prorogued Parliament, which would, as we all know, become a recurring theme. The Prime Minister's actions in fact killed the bill. The Conservatives introduced it once and the Prime Minister killed the bill by proroguing Parliament.

It took the government approximately five months before reintroducing the bill as Bill C-45 on March 3 of that year. Once again, this bill was never brought forward for second reading debate, and a few months later the Prime Minister broke his own fixed election law, thereby killing the bill again.

It is difficult to believe that the Conservatives give any attention to military justice when we see them introduce bills with absolutely no intention of ever debating them. Therefore, I am pleased we are debating this today and hope we will see more of this bill, but that remains to be seen.

What this shows once again, unfortunately, is that we cannot trust the government, just as we cannot trust it when it comes to military procurement. We have seen what the Conservatives have been saying about the joint strike fighter project, the F-35s, the stealth fighters that they want to purchase. They have said for months in the House that a competition is not required because Canada was part of one back in 1999-2000.

[Strengthening Military Justice in the Defence of Canada Act, December 6th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I will begin by seeking unanimous consent to split my time with the hon. member for Markham—Unionville.

[Sustaining Canada's Economic Recovery Act, November 30th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague from Scarborough Centre for his comments. In fact. if I were to thank him in his own language. I would say:

[Member spoke in Greek].

[English]

My hon. colleague from Scarborough Centre said that he would not talk about the unkept promises of the government. I can understand why. It is because we only have 20 minutes for a speech at this stage of debate on this bill and It would require unlimited time to go through that list.

I will talk for a minute about what the finance minister has been doing. He has been going around the country bragging about Canada's record, economically, and the situation, fiscally, and about our strong banks.

I am sure my hon. colleagues know that the Conservative government came into office with a surplus of $13 billion that it inherited from the previous Liberal government and, within three years, it had increased spending by 17.8%, far beyond the rate of inflation.

Of course, we also know that the Conservatives were in favour of changes to regulations that govern banks that would have put us in a much worse situation in the crisis that we have had in the last couple of years with this recession and in the crisis that led to this recession.

I wonder if my hon. colleague would comment on the finance minister's bragging as he goes about the country, and whether he believes that is justified.

[Sustaining Canada's Economic Recovery Act, November 29th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I almost do not need to answer what my colleague has said because the words he used are very accurate. He has made the argument and the case very strongly.

However, it is an important point to restate because I cannot imagine a finance minister going around the world, as the finance minister has, taking credit for doing nothing about the banks, or actually that he and his party were opposed to the regulations that kept our banks solvent during the crisis that happened two years ago.

It is important to set the record straight in this regard, because we are thankful in this country that our banks have been secure and have weathered the recession so very well. Obviously they had some problems. There were cases where some banks had a little too much asset backed commercial paper and that was risky. It bothered me that we had banks that were holding basically paper but had not really done the job of checking out whether the loans that paper was based upon supported that value, that they paid for those.

Basically, the loans were sold between banks but the ones that were buying them were not going back and checking before they bought the stuff whether people who were being given the loans could afford to make payments. I have heard horror stories. People who might qualify in this country for a mortgage of $30,000, in the U.S. actually getting a mortgage in the range of $500,000. When we hear that kind of story it is no wonder that the system in the U.S. fell apart the way it did. However, thank goodness our banks did not have much of that and that they had regulations that made sure they had to be governed better.

[Sustaining Canada's Economic Recovery Act, November 29th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, when we consider this issue, it is one that has been a real challenge for the member's ridings, I realize, but also for much of industrial Ontario, the industrial heartland of the country, when we have seen so many jobs lost in manufacturing largely because of the high dollar. We have seen the same thing in Nova Scotia. It not only affects manufacturing but also the resource industries. It affects, for example, the forestry sector, but it certainly affects the fishery. In Boston, which is a major seafood market, when our lobsters are costing more because our dollar is higher, it is harder to sell them. We end up having to lower the price of the lobsters in order to sell them. It has an impact.

By the way, in my part of Atlantic Canada, fishermen went out today. Today is the first day of the lobster fishery, the last Monday of November in much of my province. People are out on the sea and I pray and hope that they will all be safe because today is a day we all worry about. They go out with their boats fully laden with lobster pots and it can be a dangerous day. Let us hope they are all right.

It is a problem for many people, not just manufacturers. At the same time, what is interesting is that the U.S. dollar is so low. The Canadian dollar is high largely because of our oil sector. The oil sector is actually impacted by that as well because barrels of oil are priced in U.S. dollars. With the U.S. dollar being low, from what I have been reading and hearing, it has a negative impact on places like Alberta and Newfoundland. They are doing better than most places still, thank goodness, and that—

[Sustaining Canada's Economic Recovery Act, November 29th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I am surprised that a Conservative member wants to talk about clean energy and the government's record on clean energy when we consider what has happened over the past almost five years since the government was elected. It removed the renewable power production incentive and killed the wind power production incentive. The government has had very little interest over that five-year period in anything related to clean energy. The capital allowance is finally something toward clean energy but it is not very much.

Overall, the government has shown little appetite or interest for this matter at all. Until August, I was the critic for the last year or so on natural resources and had occasions to sit in the Standing Committee of the House of Commons on Natural Resources and heard from people working in this industry about how frustrated they were.

These were people working in renewable energy, for instance, assessing homes, examining the energy efficiency of a house and helping people to renew them based upon the program that existed until the end of March last year, which the government killed. They said that it had a devastating impact on an industry that was involved not only in examining and assessing the energy standards in a house and giving advice to people on how they could improve their energy use, reduce their costs and better insulate, but also on the companies that were doing the renovations to actually reduce heating costs. Those are lost jobs because of the government's action.

[Sustaining Canada's Economic Recovery Act, November 29th, 2010]

It is quite a talent, as my hon. colleague from Scarborough—Guildwood says.

That is over three times the rate of inflation the way he increased spending. It seems that even the finance minister, based upon his quote, finds his own massive increases in government spending irresponsible. Surely he must.

The Conservative, out of control, borrow and spend fiscal policy put Canada into a structural deficit. The finance minister needs to stop the government's risky spending and show some leadership when it comes to fiscal responsibility.

He said, “The record shows we take a principled, practical, and prudent approach to leadership”. What a claim. Has he looked at his own record? I do not think so. As a Conservative member himself described, one of my colleagues, has he been too busy “spending like it's Christmas”? That is what a member on that side actually said the government was doing. It is spending like it is Christmas.

Let us take some more time to look at the minister's record since he seems to have forgotten about it.

The fact is he has never been right on deficit projection in his history as both a provincial finance minister and a federal finance minister. Even now, against all logic, the finance minister is guessing there will be a $2.6 billion surplus in five years when the Parliamentary Budget Officer has said that in five years there will still be an $11 billion deficit. The Parliamentary Budget Officer, or PBO, reports that by that time the government will have added over $200 billion to the national debt. It inherited a $13 billion surplus and it will add $200 billion to our country's debt. What a record.

The PBO predicts that there is an 85% chance the finance minister will break his promise to balance the budget by 2015-16, basically because the numbers are not there based upon what he has been given so far. We are not talking just a little off. There is a $13.6 billion spread between the government and the budget officer.

The government's willingness to gamble Canada's future on a 15% chance is disturbing. Does the finance minister not understand that when he is wrong, like he has been in the past, Canadian citizens will be left holding the bag and the bill?

The Conservatives talk of leadership, but they do not lead. At a time when it should be curbing frivolous spending, the government spent $10 billion on expensive Conservative consultants.

Let us just look at one of the examples of these costly consultants. While the finance minister speaks of fiscal prudence, the Conservative government paid an outside consultant $3,400 to write two simple press releases for VIA Rail and then promptly hired the consultant to work in a Conservative MP's office. Is $3,400 for 1,300 words the finance minister's definition of “fiscal prudence”?

The Conservatives have recklessly issued thousands of irresponsible contracts at a time when most Canadians are struggling to make ends meet. Budget 2010 continues the Conservative history of risky spending schemes.

Even at the height of the economic downturn, when Canadians were drowning in debt, the Conservatives continued their trend of risky spending schemes by tripling the advertising budget to a whopping $130 million, with no clear benefit or value to Canadians, a $130 million of taxpayer dollars for Conservative propaganda. The borrow and spend government added to its record $56 billion deficit by wasting $130 million on shiny billboards and flashy ads, while Canadian families struggled through the recession.

It is time that Canada's money went toward Canadian priorities instead of Conservative propaganda.

Canadians want thefinance minister to put a leash on his Conservative spendaholics and urge them to stop their risky spending schemes. Instead of helping Canadians recover from the downturn, the government was busy blowing over a billion dollars on the G20 photo op. Only that government could find a way to spend six times more on G20 security than the previous equivalent G20 summit in Pittsburgh. Only that government could recklessly borrow and spend so much on the G20 photo op, making it a priority ahead of helping Canadian families.

A Liberal government would put that money to much better use with our family care plan, which would help Canadians deal with the difficult task of caring for their ill-lived loved ones.

Has the finance minister considered his government's G20 purchase of $14,000 in glow sticks and building a fake lake responsible and prudent leadership? Canadians hope not, because they certainly do not want their money being wasted on costly photo ops for the Prime Minister.

Adding to the Conservative risky spending schemes is the ever-increasing expense of an untendered F-35 stealth fighter jet contract. The Auditor General warned us that its F-35 contract “carries significant risk of delays or cost increases. They represent it as being off the shelf or what would be a simple purchase. But this was anything but the case”.

Even the Pentagon is worried about escalating costs and delays with their F-35 contract. In fact it is reviewing its contract, yet the Conservative government refuses to review ours. Even John McCain is calling the F-35 costs “outrageous”. He has also said, “I share our allies' and friends' deep disappointment about the cost overruns and the difficulties that we've experienced in development of this aircraft”.

The Conservative government seems to be the only government that does not have a problem overpaying for things, as its fiscal record continues to show.

Originally the Conservatives falsely claimed that their prison bill would only cost $90 million when they introduced the legislation. They later amended these estimates to $2 billion. The Parliamentary Budget Officer has priced the bill at between $10 billion to $13 billion. It started at $90 million and we know now that it is likely to be in the range of $10 billion and $13 billion. What kind of control of spending is that?

It is beyond risky for the Conservative government to ask Parliament to vote on its legislation when it grossly misrepresents the true cost of implementing that legislation. Risky spending schemes that build unnecessary, U.S.-style megaprisons for a country with a declining crime rate is not an effective use of taxpayer dollars.

Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney said that an abrupt correction in Canada's housing market was in fact possible. The Economist says that Canada's housing is overvalued by 23 points. That is 7.3 points more than it rates Ireland's housing overvaluations. Even the National Post reports that there is a housing bubble. Yet the finance minister defies them all by saying there is no housing bubble. He also said, “It's a long stretch to compare our housing market with that of Ireland”.

Unfortunately he is right because our houses, according to these experts, are 32% more overvalued than Ireland's. Let us hope that is not the case. Let us hope there is no bubble here and it does not burst, but we should be concerned about this. This reckless and risky strategy of ignoring the facts by the finance minister is what steered Canada into deficit in the first place.

As Aldous Huxley famously said, “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored”.

A Liberal government would clean up the fiscal mess created by the borrow and spend Conservative government. I remember the challenge that faced the Liberal government in 1993 when it came into office, because I was there. I was part of the process and watched as the prime minister and finance minister worked very hard, and as Canadians sacrificed, to get us back to balanced budgets, to get us into surpluses. When the Liberal government left, there was a $13 billion surplus that the Conservative government inherited and then quickly blew.

The Conservatives have to stop ignoring the facts and focus government spending on the Canadian priorities of family care, seniors, the economy and job creation. Budget 2010 has been a complete disaster in this regard. The Conservative method of governance unfortunately is ideologically based. It is based on ideology instead of on facts. That is why they do not like information such as a census, for example.

The finance minister's arrogance in telling Canadians not to ask for things they need during the upcoming budget consultations because the government has spent the cupboard bare is disheartening for all Canadians. The Conservatives talk of restraint, but they do not restrain. It is time the government takes its own advice and stops its risky borrowing and spending and stops raising the deficit.