- Member of Parliament
- Liberal
- Scarborough—Guildwood
- Ontario
- Voting Attendance: 62%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $111,926.23
- Government Page
Madam Speaker, one of the unique advantages that Canada has is the way in which particularly the Canadian military has integrated indigenous people into the Rangers and into the larger military. They, in effect, create our sovereignty presence in the north. There has been a great deal of conversation about how to do it appropriately. As the Arctic opens up, I see this as a unique opportunity to get it right with indigenous folks. Frankly, the testimony before the defence committee to date has been that we are starting to get it right and the consultations are real and meaningful, and I would like to be optimistic about it.
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Madam Speaker, I offer to my colleague an insincere apology for not seeing her down at the other end of the chamber hiding behind her mask, but that is another thing altogether. I do appreciate her contribution to the defence committee.
The investments in the Arctic are necessarily going to be massive. As climate change takes hold, the reality is that the Arctic is opening up. Canadians need to get their heads around the notion that we are going to, not only as a defence initiative, invest heavily in the Arctic; but we also need to build ports and we need to use the facilities that we have. It is going to be extremely expensive to build the new early warning system, a massive technological enterprise.
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Madam Speaker, I would like to note that the government has actually handled its debt management quite shrewdly by buying, when the interest rates were low, long-term bonds. That has actually brought our management of debt into line.
I also encourage the hon. member to look at comparators with other nations. If there is any other nation that wishes to have the debt-to-GDP ratio that Canada has, I would be interested in the hon. member telling me who it might be.
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Madam Speaker, I appreciate this opportunity to address the fall economic statement.
Recently, I had the honour and privilege to go to Washington with the defence committee. My friend from Calgary Rocky Ridge was also on the trip. I want to thank the ambassador publicly for her contributions to the utility of our trip. We could not have been treated better. We went to the Wilson Center, the Pentagon, the Atlantic Institute, and other places. With respect to defence contacts, Washington is, frankly, the centre of the geopolitical universe.
In addition to chairing the defence committee, I also co-chair the Permanent Joint Board on Defence, which harkens back to the times of Roosevelt and Mackenzie King. I want to assure hon. members that I was not chairing the board at that time, but can expect some push-back from the member for Kingston and the Islands on that. It is an opportunity, on an annual basis, for our respective militaries to exchange public policy issues, in particular, to update their own military policies. The American government has just updated its military policy and the Canadian government is about to update its “Strong, Secure, Engaged” policy, because, frankly, the threat environment has changed dramatically in the last 12 months.
Members may wonder why I would start a speech about the fall economic statement by referring to defence. Over the course of these many meetings, I started to joke that we really should rename the defence committee to the defence, trade and commerce committee, because the threats that Canada and other western nations are facing are not merely threats that relate to what we would describe as security and military threats. Rather, they are societal, economic and business threats, which are in fact far more insidious and multi-faceted than stand-alone military and security threats.
It was clear when we arrived in Washington that the Americans regard China as what is called a pacing threat. A pacing threat is a threat to which we have to maintain our technological military superiority. They clearly regard Russia as an acute threat, one that can literally do damage, but it does not penetrate into the threat analysis in the same way as does China. The pacing threat that China is creates a grey zone of conflict. This is where it relates to our fall economic statement, because in the grey zone of conflict, there is an economics challenge, a business challenge, a democracy challenge, an intellectual property challenge, a rule of law challenge, and we could isolate many more.
The PRC uses all of these areas of access points to undermine the very fabric of our society, to steal when it is appropriate to steal, to loot when it is appropriate to loot, to sow disinformation when it is appropriate to sow disinformation. Anything of any value gets returned to Beijing one way or another, which in turn takes those intellectual, scientific and technological advantages that we currently enjoy and uses them against our western society.
Those who briefed us expressed a real worry that we need to keep ahead. A cold war mentality is setting in, but unlike the Cold War mentality of the mutually assured destruction that existed between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. in times past, it is a top-to-bottom, layer-by-layer contest over anything of any value in western societies. There is a huge advantage for the Communist Party of China, because it is a closed society. Ours are relatively open societies, and the contest is heavily weighted in favour of a closed society that has a unitary view of dominance at all costs and wishes to turn us all into vassal states.
In sharing our intellectual resources, we will see our universities are relatively open. The concept in western society is that we share knowledge with a view to building knowledge, and the real question is whether we can actually continue that. The argument, if one was looking at this from a threat analysis standpoint, is that we cannot.
We have a patent regime that exists to protect investor and property rights. Again, a society that routinely abuses the patents that exist and takes no responsibility to compensate the creator is a system that may not continue to be able to exist.
Further, we have open real estate markets. We have heard a lot about the cost of living. What is, in part, driving the cost of living are massive infusions of monies from abroad, somewhat from China in particular, which drives up the prices of housing. In turn, that makes housing unaffordable to our own population and distorts our entire market system. That cannot continue.
We have an open investor system in mines and minerals. Again, we cannot allow state-owned enterprises to own critical minerals and critical mines.
We have an open democracy. We cannot continue with the misinformation and voter influence campaigns that are run from the People's Republic of China. When we hear the threat analysis from the people in the Pentagon and leading thinkers in all of these institutions, we realize all these layers of threat are significant to our way of life and significant to the prosperity that, frankly, is reflected in our fall economic statement.
These are just a few examples of the layered threats that go from a traditional military threat right through to abuse of our democracy.
I looked at the fall economic statement and compared it to the Parliamentary Budget Officer's view of the same set of numbers. Frankly, there is not a great deal of difference between the two. Occasionally the government is a bit more optimistic than the PBO and on occasion the PBO is a bit more optimistic than the government, but on several layers we are necessarily simply going to need to adjust.
Capital flows from the PRC are going to need to be restricted, and these capital flows will need to be replaced internally or from abroad, probably primarily from the U.S. In fact, the United States military has set up a fund, where it is available to invest in various technologies but also various mines and minerals that will be needed to keep ahead of a pacing threat.
I have a relative, for instance, who works at a leading research company, and the Department of Defense is actually one of the significant investors in that company. Rare earth minerals require a lot of capital and are critical to the 21st century economy. They are also critical to weapons technology.
Canada is treated as a domestic supplier for defence procurement. We will start to draw down on that status much more vigorously as we reshore, we nearshore and friend-shore critical investments.
I see that Madam Speaker is hinting that my time might be finished, so I will end here.
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