Pierre Paul-Hus

[Public Safety, December 2nd, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, for nine years, we have been asking this Prime Minister to wake up and regain control of our border, but he continues to do the opposite. For example, in 2015, the number of unprocessed asylum claims was under 10,000. Today, there are over 260,000 unprocessed claims.

We called for more policing of our border and greater collaboration with provincial police forces to crack down on human trafficking, illegal entry, drug production and trafficking and so on.

We have proposed a plan. Will the government agree to it and implement it?

[U.S. Tariffs on Canadian Products, November 26th, 2024]

Madam Speaker, I do not think my colleague is ever going to know what it is like to run a government. However, his support for the Liberal government over the past nine years ensured that the country's national debt doubled.

What will he say to Canadians who are now required to pay more for the goods and services they need because inflation has gone up, everything is more expensive and the price of housing has doubled because of the inflationary measures of this government, which is supported by my colleague and his friends?

[U.S. Tariffs on Canadian Products, November 26th, 2024]

Madam Speaker, I will remain respectful because my colleague is new here. He is flexing his muscles and having a bit of fun, but he has no idea how the Canadian and U.S. forces work together.

Maybe he should check his notes and look up what NORAD is. Canada and the United States work together as part of a larger, binational military organization. That is NORAD. Together with NATO, we are all interconnected. Canada and the United States are NATO's western flank. We are geostrategically important, and we have to work with our American partners. We cannot work independently.

I would remind him that if Quebec should delight him by separating someday, it will have to engage with the rest of Canada to help defend Quebec. He should keep that in mind.

[U.S. Tariffs on Canadian Products, November 26th, 2024]

Madam Speaker, if the member opposite had listened carefully to what I said earlier, he would have heard that today's numbers are different from earlier figures because NATO rules changed in 2017. NATO allowed Canada to include the Coast Guard, veterans' pensions and the Department of National Defence's IT expenses in the defence budgets. Some $7 billion was been allocated to this spending, which suddenly, magically, ended up being factored into the GDP target.

The Liberals came in and said they were doing more than the Conservatives. I understand how. They took a bunch of expenses that were already being incurred and included them in the calculation. That helped boost the figures. What did they do in 2023? They cut a billion dollars from the budget, even though the President of the Treasury Board said that the government would not normally touch National Defence. They made cuts. Some $7 billion was added, and it has been going down ever since. They are talking nonsense.

[U.S. Tariffs on Canadian Products, November 26th, 2024]

Madam Speaker, my colleague from Jonquière must be following what is going on right now and why the new U.S. president-elect is threatening to impose 25% tariffs. These are the consequences related to border management and drug trafficking. Canada's national defence, which is a bit player as far as the Americans are concerned, only adds to the friction. That is why we are taking stock of Canada's military situation in relation to our partnership with the Americans. It is part of our overall national security. That is why Canada is currently being criticized.

According to the Public Accounts, the Liberals have let billions of dollars in defence spending fall by the wayside since 2015. This essentially means that through their mismanagement, they have failed to spend the billions of dollars that were allocated for national defence. Only 58% of the Canadian Armed Forces would be able to respond to a crisis if called upon by NATO allies today. Nearly half of all military equipment is considered unavailable and unusable. This is one reason why the American president is fed up. It seems pretty clear to me.

The Liberals ended up choosing the F-35s to replace the aging CF-18s, but that happened only after several years of mismanagement and political interference in the procurement process. That is something else the Americans are sick of. Richard Shimooka of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute described this situation as disastrous in a 2019 report.

For our part, when we were in power, we took our military obligations seriously. For example, we quickly acquired five C-17 Globemaster transport aircraft, 17 CC‑130J Hercules transport aircraft, 15 Chinook helicopters, some Leopard tanks. We modernized the CP-140 surveillance aircraft, as well as the Halifax class frigates, and so on. That made our American colleagues happy. We were with them in Afghanistan to fight against the Taliban.

Retired Lieutenant-General Andrew Leslie said something about Canada's ailing military. Let us not forget that he was a Liberal member for four years. He did not seek reelection because he understood the problem I am talking about. He said that in the past decade, the Liberals “spent more money on consultants and professional services than it did on the Army, Navy and Air Force combined”.

Here are a few facts. We have fewer than 35 personnel deployed on UN missions, compared with almost 2,500 in 2003. We are the only NATO country whose level of military operational readiness is falling, while all the others' readiness levels are soaring. We have the longest and least efficient supply system in NATO, of all member countries, in fact. We are the only NATO country without a concrete plan to reach 2% of GDP, a target that was agreed to by the Minister of Defence in 2008, reiterated in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 and I could go on. We are the only NATO country whose defence minister has publicly admitted that he failed to convince his cabinet colleagues of the importance of NATO defence spending and the 2% GDP target.

“This is borderline atrocious”: That is a quote from Vice-Admiral Mark Norman, for those who were here in 2016 and 2017. Members will remember Admiral Norman. Vice-Admiral Norman said, “Readiness is all about measuring the ability of your armed forces to do what it is they're expected to do. And fundamentally, that's all about going somewhere and fighting. And, you know, it's a pretty dire situation when you're...not where you need to be”. What Admiral Norman was basically saying is that we need to be ready for combat. We always need to be ready for any deployment we are asked to do. That is not happening now. We are not ready.

The Liberal government has a disastrous record on national defence. Canadian forces members have not had any leadership in 10 years. As we used to say back in my day, when the situation changed, it went “order, counter-order, disorder”. For nine years, it has been “disorder, disorder, disorder”.

We want to put Canada first again. For that, there needs to be a plan.

Where is the plan?

[U.S. Tariffs on Canadian Products, November 26th, 2024]

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—

[U.S. Tariffs on Canadian Products, November 26th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, in his speech, my colleague from Jonquière said that the Conservatives never talked about closing borders after the problems we had with illegal immigrants.

My colleague was elected in 2019, if I am not mistaken. Since 2017, from day one, when the Prime Minister posted his infamous tweet inviting the whole world to come to Canada, I have been here and I have been asking questions. I even went to Roxham Road three times through the United States, and I took the leader of the Conservative Party at the time there, too. I have done interviews and spoken about it many times in the House. I would like my colleague to withdraw his remarks because my colleague from Calgary Nose Hill and I have held press conferences and issued press releases. We have been there ourselves, many times. What he said is false.

[Privilege, November 26th, 2024]

Madam Speaker, obviously, we are still talking about $400 million because that is the known quantity. However, the Auditor General said that she found this amount of $400 million by checking 40% to 60% of the data, which means that we could actually be talking about an amount of up to $1 billion. That is even more scandalous. This $400 million is already a huge amount.

Today, we are talking about billions of dollars. The government gives out billions of dollars like it is candy. However, $400 million is a lot of money. It is 10 times more than the sponsorship scandal. Let us not forget that. This may be just the first step. Millions of dollars more could be added to this. That is why we need all of the information.

[Privilege, November 26th, 2024]

Madam Speaker, that is an excellent question.

How much money is going to be found? We know that $400 million was misappropriated. That $400 million disappeared and we know that it went to friends. Now, we need to know precisely who received the money and how. We know that at least $400 million can be found. Often, when we have access to the documents, when we can see the information, we notice that even more money was given, without us realizing it.

[Privilege, November 26th, 2024]

Madam Speaker, the current trademark of the Liberal government is to set up structures and systems that are completely independent of Parliament or the government, while hiring 109,000 new public servants and creating a megastructure of employees to manage government business. There are two things happening. On the one hand, there are external structures and external companies that are paid $20 billion a year to manage government affairs. They like to call it strategic advice. On the other hand, the civil service is being increased by 40%. There is a lack of coherence there.

What does that tell us about this government? It tells us that it has no confidence in the institution and its government team. At the same time, it is expanding it dramatically, while still shipping business to outside companies. No one really knows how this works, and no one really knows what is going on. This lack of transparency means that, once again, trust is broken.