- Member of Parliament
- Liberal
- Scarborough—Guildwood
- Ontario
- Voting Attendance: 62%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $111,926.23
- Government Page
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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- Apr/5/22 4:09:44 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the hon. and very capable member for Kings—Hants.
It is an honour for me to participate in this discussion, and I like to see it as a discussion as opposed to a partisan debate because this affects us all. Security is a universal problem, regardless of where one falls on the political spectrum.
I am going to take an unusual tack and take us back to 1940. At that point, Canada had something in the order of the third or fourth largest navy in the world, probably one of the larger armies in the world and a growing air force. In fact, Canada was considered a place where a lot of the training took place for people in the air force.
It was not a good time for the allies. The Germans were making really good progress right across Europe, literally taking over quite a number of countries, and the British were rightly concerned. The British gold reserves had been moved to Canada. There was talk that the royal family might need to be moved to Canada. The situation was pretty grim.
President Roosevelt was trying to help as best he could with the allies, but he was hampered by domestic politics. Of course, Canada was involved in that war at that point in 1940 very extensively. Prime Minister Mackenzie King realized early on that Canada was going to need to transfer its security arrangements from the declining British Empire to the ascendant American Empire. To that end, he met with President Roosevelt in Ogdensburg, New York, in a railway car, and he negotiated with President Roosevelt the transfer of those security arrangements. Both the prime minister and the president saw that the defence of North America was going to take a mutual effort.
President Roosevelt was concerned about the upscaling of Japanese aggression in the Pacific, and he saw the British Columbia coast as an easy entry point to North America. German subs were lurking in the north Atlantic, sometimes in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and President Roosevelt felt that something had to be done.
The initial position of President Roosevelt was to simply make the Canadian military part of the U.S. north command, and that was a position that was rejected by Mackenzie King, who wanted to keep the Canadian military as a separate stand-alone military under the direction of the Government of Canada and the Parliament of Canada.
Out of the Ogdensburg agreement came the Permanent Joint Board on Defence. It was, has been, and still is the senior advisory body to develop defence architecture for North America during the past 80 years. However, the working presumption has been that Canada would have a fully functioning stand-alone military capable of defending Canada and contributing significantly to the defence of North America.
That was very true 80 years ago, and for a long time it continued to be true. Canadians like the idea of being independent of the American military adventures. However, what they do not like is paying for it.
Members will recall in this very chamber President Obama, in the nicest, kindness and gentlest way, saying that they would appreciate some help with burden sharing. Members will also recall that President Trump, in his own irritating way, said much the same thing.
Secretary General Stoltenberg has also said much the same thing and has taken note of our contribution to NATO, yet the entire premise of Mackenzie King's argument with President Roosevelt was that Canada would have an independent military that was capable of defending Canada and contributing significantly to the defence of North America. NORAD was the most significant outcome of the permanent joint board on defence, and it has been a valuable point of collaboration between the two militaries. Canada has been a huge beneficiary of that treaty.
That was then, however, and now is now. Over the years, through all Canadian governments, military capabilities have declined, along with our percentage of GDP spent on military spending. We have, as a previous member said, enjoyed a prolonged peace dividend. What he did not add, and I add it here, is that it has been at the expense of our American cousins. As John Manley, the former foreign affairs minister, once said, we cannot always go to the bathroom when the bill arrives. We have spent too much time in the bathroom, and the bill has arrived.
“Strong, Secure and Engaged” contemplated about $163 billion of additional spending over 20 years. Unfortunately, even this relatively modest goal has proved to be difficult, as the military has lapsed about $5 billion in the last three years. The military's own readiness report makes for some depressing reading.
Then along comes February 24, when, as others have said, everything changed. Our entire threat assessment accelerated the timeline way beyond anyone's previous expectations. At that time the defence committee was engaged in a threat assessment. When we began the threat assessment, none of us had anticipated that Russia would actually carry out an invasion of Ukraine. If we are to defend our own sovereignty and, as importantly, contribute to the sovereignty of others, we have to step up with real fiscal firepower. It is in equipment and personnel, and it is in personnel and it is equipment. Witness after witness after witness at the defence committee keeps telling us about CAF's problems with recruitment and retention of personnel.
Military personnel are expensive. It costs literally millions of dollars to train and retain a pilot. Retaining a pilot is as difficult as training a pilot. Cyber-specialists are a hot commodity, and private companies can offer generous salaries and benefits that are very attractive.
Witness after witness tells us of a procurement system that is broken. Journalist Gwynne Dyer once said that the next war will be a “come as you are” war. There will not be any time to fix anything and there will not be any time to buy new stuff, and the bills will be huge, in part because we kept kicking the decisions down the road. I am glad to see a decision has been made on F-35s, but the all-domain warning system is going to be a hugely expensive acquisition.
Russia has been showing that it has hypersonic capability and that it has militarized the Arctic. If we cannot defend our sovereignty on our own, then we will have to rely on others, and if we have to rely on others, we have to hope that their interests align with ours. Prime Minister Mackenzie King intuitively understood the desire for an independent sovereign nation, and he further understood the cost of being that independent sovereign nation.
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- Jan/31/22 10:16:52 p.m.
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Madam Chair, I will be sharing my time with my former seatmate, the member for Vancouver Centre.
It is getting late, and I note that at the end of this week is the beginning of the Olympics. There will be one nation out of all the nations in the world that will not be allowed to compete under its own flag, and that is the Russian nation. The Olympic committee finally got sick of all the corruption, doping, cheating and lying that was coming out of the Russian government and will not allow Russian athletes to compete under their own flag.
This is what we, meaning the family of nations, the universe of nations, including Canada, the U.S., the U.K. and Ukraine, deal with on a daily basis, because nothing happens in Russia without Vladimir Putin's express permission. When he says there might be 100,000 troops on the Ukrainian border or that they are just exercises and there is nothing to see, it is just nonsense and no one should really pay much attention because he does not speak the truth very often.
I was once privileged to spend some time with Senator Lisa Murkowski. She has available to her a map of the Arctic. I do not know if it is available publicly, but it is like looking at the Arctic from 50,000 feet above the North Pole. What it shows is the remilitarization of the Arctic by the Russian government, with all of the refurbished old bases and all of the new installations as well. While Canada, even from that map, is far away from the Russian bases, the U.S. is very close, at the Bering Strait, as are Finland, Sweden, Greenland, Denmark and Norway. The remilitarization of the Arctic, in my judgment, is what contributes to why it is in Canada's best interests to fully participate in the Ukrainian repulsion of this Russian aggression.
Henry Kissinger once said that nations do not have permanent friends or enemies; they only have interests. Regardless of whether one is Ukrainian or not, or whether one has diaspora in one's community or not, in my judgment it is in Canada's best interests to fully support Ukraine.
Russia routinely launches massive cyber-attacks on Canada, the last one being at a hospital in Newfoundland. It is nothing but a mafia shakedown: “If you pay us millions of dollars, we'll let you have your hospital back.” Russia routinely steals significant amounts of industrial and commercial intellectual property. Russian oligarchs have purchased significant pieces of industrial and commercial property in order to burrow deeply into Canadian society, and that money has been generated from very dubious sources. Russia is quite skilled at the game of misinformation and disinformation.
There are many, many more reasons why Ukraine's security is our security and our security is Ukraine's security. I would ask members to cast their minds along the eastern European flank to western Russia, because if Ukraine goes, the next place to go is Poland and the Baltics. When we get past Poland and the Baltics, we get to Finland. After Finland is Sweden, Norway and Denmark, and suddenly this is at our border.
I see my time is up, and I look forward to my colleagues' questions.
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