Jason Kenney

[Terrorism, September 25th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, does the government under current legislation have the power to seize and freeze the assets of groups like Al-Qaida, Islamic Jihad, the Armed Islamic Group and Hamas, all of which according to CSIS are operating in Canada? Do we have that power to seize and freeze assets?

[Terrorism, September 25th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, on Friday the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions forwarded a letter to Canadian banks asking them to co-operate with the FBI in investigating certain individuals, most of whom are already dead.

This letter makes no reference to freezing and seizing the Canadian assets of Al-Qaida and other terrorist groups, but the minister said that this letter was a notice naming the organizations that they were to go after. Where is the list of terrorist organizations whose assets are to be frozen by Canadian banks? Where is that list?

[Committees of the House, September 19th, 2001]

Madam Speaker, I thank my hon. friend for his question. I do not know the particulars surrounding the Shearwater base, but he makes a reasonable point. As we are now clearly having to reassess our military priorities and expenditures, I think it would be reasonable to suggest at least a moratorium on further base closings.

I do think, however, that where we have bases our procurement policies in principle should be based on the operational needs of our forces, to create maximum operational efficiency for the forces. Shearwater may very well meet that criterion. I would support the hon. member in delaying any closures until we can see in this new environment the need for bases of that nature.

[Committees of the House, September 19th, 2001]

Madam Speaker, I would suggest that the government could find the resources necessary to provide that equipment and so much more equipment that is necessary by reallocating resources as I suggested to reflect what our national priorities ought to be, particularly at this time of crisis.

In the past our party has recommended at least an immediate additional funding commitment of $1 billion to the Department of National Defence in order to procure the sort of equipment to which my hon. friend refers. We would find those resources for national defence and additional resources on top of that by taking those dollars away from frivolous, low priority programs.

We are unable to provide the kind of equipment my friend is talking about, yet the Minister of Industry is speculating on creating a $3 billion program to subsidize access to high speed broadband Internet in Canada. That is not a federal responsibility. It is a responsibility of the marketplace.

Or there is the Minister of Multiculturalism, who just spent $4 million in tax dollars sending professional members of lobby groups and friends of hers to the outrageous Durban conference in South Africa to stay in four star and five star hotels at taxpayers' expense and involve themselves in a disgraceful gabfest surrounded by anti-Semitism in various forms.

Those are the kinds of spending priorities reflected by the government. Those are dollars spent on corporate welfare: economic development programs that do not work and do not create jobs, and handouts to Liberal lobby groups. These are dollars that could be going to our highest national priority, defence.

[Committees of the House, September 19th, 2001]

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to have the opportunity to rise in debate in support of this concurrence motion for the report of the Standing Committee on National Defence and Veterans Affairs at this particularly prescient moment.

As I said in my remarks on the motion before the House regarding the tragedy that struck the United States last week, the whole world has changed dramatically, particularly the world in terms of strategic considerations for free countries such as Canada, for NATO countries in particular. Yet the dramatic new realities we face, particularly on the strategic front, have not in any way been reflected by the government.

Let us start from first principles. The first responsibility of a national and federal government is the maintenance and protection of national sovereignty. It is not one among competing objectives. It is not some nice to do thing that finds its way onto the list of government programs. It is the first principal responsibility of a national government.

There are dozens, probably hundreds of programs administered by the federal government at taxpayers' expense where the federal government has no constitutional responsibility. Yet it has neglected its principal, its first, its primary responsibility year after year, and not just this government but its predecessor governments going back nearly four decades.

When the second world war ended Canada had the third largest navy in the world. The Royal Canadian Air Force was regarded as perhaps the most respected military air force in the world. Our ground troops had punched far beyond their weight in the ground war in Europe and in military actions in the Pacific theatre in that war. We finished that terrible five year conflict proud as a nation of the tremendous contribution we had made, marshalling our national resources, tragically sacrificing so much Canadian blood but for a noble objective.

For the past 30 years, and particularly under the Liberal government for the past 8 or 9 years, we have seen that proud military tradition and our ability to do our moral duty eroded by indifference, eroded by the wrong priorities, eroded by a federal government that does not recognize the safety and security of its citizens and the protection of its national sovereignty as its primary objective.

Between the years 1994 and 1999 the government exercised a modest expenditure restraint program. Mainly it raised revenues and raised taxes to address the crushing deficit, but it did restrain program spending in certain areas. Again, however, the way in which it cut reflected its complete perversion of priorities because it cut defence spending by over 20% at a time when non-defence department program spending was cut by only 3%.

What this indicates is that the first primary responsibility of the federal government was cut most deeply and the lower priority areas which are not even contemplated in the constitution as federal responsibilities were barely touched at all. This is the world turned upside down in terms of public responsibilities.

Madam Speaker, I neglected to mention that I will be splitting my time.

We are left in the regrettable situation whereby Canada reinvests less than half among the average of NATO countries in defence expenditures as a percentage of gross domestic product. Our 19 NATO allies on average spend 2.1% of their gross domestic product in defence of national sovereignty whereas Canada spends only 1.2% of GDP, giving us the second lowest defence expenditure in NATO, ahead of only the tiny duchy of Luxembourg with a military force of 800 people.

We have become, notwithstanding the tremendously hardworking, skilled, dedicated and patriotic people in our military force, a token player at best in the military alliance in which we, as one of the world's largest economies, the most prosperous nations, have a moral responsibility to be a bulwark in.

We have the seventh largest gross domestic product in the world, a great blessing for a small country, and an enormously prosperous standard of living and national wealth. However, while we have the seventh largest gross domestic product, we have the twenty-sixth largest defence investment and we are 18th of out of the 19 NATO countries.

This is a complete betrayal of our national tradition as a country that is willing to invest resources to at least do our share, if not more than our share, to defend democracy and peace here and abroad.

Look at the particulars raised by some of my colleagues earlier in the debate that have been discussed at the defence committee.

For instance, according to the 1994 defence white paper, we are supposed to be able to field at least a brigade of 5,500 ground troops abroad at a high state of readiness in a conventional conflict. It is absolutely clear that we do not have the capacity to do so right now, according to every expert in our defence.

Only 83 of our 120-some fighter craft CF-18s are operational and virtually none of those fighter craft have modern, contemporary radar and electronics equipment systems which are critical, indispensable, to engaging in modern air combat.

We have no lift capacity for our ground troops. Even if we had 5,500 troops that we could put on the ground at a high state of readiness, in the words of retired Major-General Lewis MacKenzie we would have to hitch a ride and take a taxi from American aircraft in order to transport our troops to a theatre of conflict.

Our much celebrated frigate fleet cannot even put to sea simultaneously. Often one sees those frigates tied up in Halifax or Esquimalt because they do not even have a budget for fuel to operate for the course of an entire month.

This is an embarrassment and it is a humiliation to the men and women who risk their lives to defend our national sovereignty.

Ten years ago, we had a defence force smaller than our share of 90,000 people in our military, now down to 55,000. We have essentially halved our commitment. We have done this, I believe, because it reflects a philosophical attitude of the Liberal government that investments in national defence and protection of sovereignty are not a priority, that it is a frivolous occupation of would be warmongers and that the second war was the war to end all wars. That was folly between 1918 and 1939. Equally it is folly today, as we have seen from last week's events.

Regrettably, I heard the defence minister virtually dismiss out of hand in question period the other day the notion that there would be a conventional war as a result of the attack on America and the free world last week. When pressed as to why he made this assumption he had no clear answer.

I would like to close by saying that we may very well, as a free nation in NATO, find ourselves in the midst of not just one conventional conflict but potentially serial conventional conflicts over the coming years. We do not know, but it is our moral responsibility to be prepared for that eventuality and to do so means that we must fundamentally reorder the priorities of the federal government to at least do our share.

To do that, even to have the average military expenditure amongst NATO countries would mean a $9 billion increase in our defence budget. That is a huge line item, but we must begin to think about the magnitude of reordering our priorities, to do our share and to do our military men and women proud as well as preserving our rich tradition as a defender of democracy and freedom.

[Committees of the House, September 19th, 2001]

Madam Speaker, I commend my friend from Saint John for her longstanding and passionate advocacy of the need for our country to place much greater emphasis on our capacity to defend ourselves and advance our national sovereignty. She is certainly a very principled advocate of that.

I agreed with her remarks with the exception of her comment on procurement programs such as shipbuilding for national defence. I inferred from her comments that she was suggesting we ought to procure equipment in Canada as a sort of industrial policy.

This is a concern to me because it seems that the objective in providing a strong national defence and maximizing our scarce resources ought to be to seek the best available equipment at the lowest possible price, even if that means tendering defence procurement contracts overseas.

Does she think that if it costs us more to tender a procurement contract for defence equipment to a domestic company that this is in the best interest of advancing our capacity to defend ourselves and maximizing those scarce tax dollars?

[The Economy, September 18th, 2001]

That is what we get when we head into a recession. Mr. Speaker.

Given the urgent need for increased resources for areas of national security and for us to prosecute our part in the war on terrorism, does the finance minister have plans or is he making plans to transfer financial resources from low priority areas and departments to the urgent priorities of the RCMP, CSIS and national defence?

[The Economy, September 18th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, since the House last met unemployment has gone up, the dollar has gone down, the economy has stopped growing, economists are predicting a recession and, according to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Canada is now at war.

What, if anything, is the finance minister doing to react to the economic and fiscal consequences of these dramatic new realities?

[Allotted Day--Anti-Terrorism Legislation, September 18th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, the motion is not legislation. It is simply, as all motions are, a statement of parliament's intent in a general sense in principle. It is not a replication of a statute in any other jurisdiction. It includes ideas that are included in U.K. statutes, as well as other anti-terrorism legislation.

As to the extradition of those who are found to be associated with terrorist organizations, I am sure that is the case in the United Kingdom. I will read from one of Canada's leading immigration lawyer's, Sergio Karas, who was quoted in the National Post last week as saying “We are the laughingstock of the world because of our incredibly high acceptance rate for refugee claimants”. He also said that there was an incredibly important need for us to deport people who are lawbreakers and associated with organizations of this nature.

[Allotted Day--Anti-Terrorism Legislation, September 18th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I do not think it is necessary to modify the motion. These are sound policy proposals gleaned from the legislation of several other democratic jurisdictions and would form the basis of a reference for the justice and human rights standing committee, which could then include the concerns such as those raised by the member and other potential remedies.

We have not brought this motion forward as a complete solution to any problem. We have brought it forward as the basis of some concrete legislative remedies. Instead of nebulous talk about addressing root causes, at least someone is bringing forward some specific ideas here. Let us give it to the members of the justice committee and let them determine it.

I keep hearing the point about being patient. Yes, we must act rationally and not emotionally. We must be deliberate and not chaotic in our response, but let there be no mistake about the urgency of this fight.

I want to quote George Will from an article he wrote last week. He said “the New York and Washington attacks were a minor overture to the cymbal-crash crescendo of violence our enemies are building toward”. He went on to say that when they get nuclear weapons they will use them, so western policy must respond to a closing window for pre-emption.

I could not agree more. That is the next step of these merchants of violence. It is the unthinkable. It is the unimaginable use of weapons of mass destruction. This is not something where the west can slowly, ponderously, in our typical Canadian way, wait and delay and procrastinate. There is urgency in this matter. We do not know how far these evil people are from getting their hands on weapons of mass destruction. It could be weeks, months or years but we must act as though it were a matter of great urgency.