- Member of Parliament
- Liberal
- Scarborough—Guildwood
- Ontario
- Voting Attendance: 62%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $111,926.23
- Government Page
- Jun/1/22 9:55:28 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I want to share an experience with the hon. member about NATO. I was travelling with John Manley, the then foreign affairs minister. Our itinerary was London, Paris, Riga and Berlin. When we were in Riga, the President of Latvia came into the room and she harangued John and me for 20 minutes about getting into NATO. This was in September 2001. She did not want anything else. She just wanted into NATO, because she saw NATO as her best security guarantee against the Russians. We went to Germany and, to John's credit, he put the Latvian question to the Germans. They had the same question: “What about the Russians?”
Is the hon. member prepared to assert her judgment about the utility of NATO against the President of Latvia's judgment about the utility of NATO?
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- Jun/1/22 9:29:19 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is an honour and a pleasure to participate in this debate.
I will be splitting my time with the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands. I am not quite sure how that got in there, but my colleague from Saanich—Gulf Islands and I are apparently splitting this time, and I am honoured to do so.
As members have heard, a number of us travelled to Vilnius, Lithuania, in the past few days to participate in the parliamentary NATO conference. It was truly one of those extraordinary experiences, which I had the honour of sharing with the members for Saint-Jean, Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, North Island—Powell River and Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, as well as Senator Cordy and Senator Bellemare.
As the member for North Island—Powell River indicated, it is an important element of our responsibilities to participate in these meetings, which extend parliamentary diplomacy and extend our values as Canadians as we try to wrestle with some of the most intractable issues in global politics.
When one lands in Vilnius and comes out of the airport, one sees a country that is sort of emerging from Soviet occupation. Some of the buildings are extraordinarily beautiful. Some are clearly classic, and others are this brutal Soviet architecture, which is just kind of falling down. When one gets to the hotel, one is in a revitalized area of the city, and as one emerges from the hotel, one is confronted with the history of the Baltics, the history of Lithuania. As one walks out of the hotel and goes to the main street, on the left are the parliamentary buildings, about three blocks away, where the issues are debated, which is essentially where we were for the three or four days that we were in Vilnius.
I must say that the presentations were absolutely extraordinary. They were pointed, detailed, very useful and very united. Interestingly, one of the speakers there was the defence minister from Ukraine, and, today, he received a threat of assassination. Nothing focuses the mind like that. However, this was the kind of atmosphere in which we spent, peripherally I would say, three or four days.
From the hotel, if one goes left, there are the parliamentary buildings, and if one goes right, about the same distance, three blocks, one gets to the Vilnius version of Lubyanka, which is where the Russians tortured and killed political prisoners. This one in Vilnius is now a museum to the genocide of the Soviet occupation. Our delegation did not have time to tour what has been turned into a museum of genocide, but as I walked down the sidewalk, in this beautiful, old town of the city, with a gorgeous park right across the street, I saw inscribed on the walls of this prison the names of the people who had been tortured and killed in that building.
What is even more extraordinary, when we read the birth dates and the death dates, is that these people were 23, 25, and occasionally 40 years old. Sometimes they were 21 years old, and sometimes they were even a teenager. Their lives were cut off at the beginning of their aspirations to live a full human life. The reality of these brutal occupations of the Baltic nations over the course of history just descends on us. This is where history and geopolitics merge.
The Baltic nations, whether Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania, have always been the highways to Hell, and whether it was German or Soviet occupations, they have been occupied. Lithuania has actually enjoyed relatively few years of independence, so for the average citizen of Lithuania, this is is not an abstraction. It is not an academic discussion at Carleton University or the University of Ottawa political science department. This is reality for these folks, so when we talk about Finland or Sweden joining NATO, that means something, and that is a real security guarantee that, up to now, they have not enjoyed.
They are afraid, and for a darned good reason, of the Baltic Sea turning into a Russian lake because they would then be threatened not only from land borders, but also from the Baltic Sea, much like the Black Sea, which Putin is attempting to turn into a Russian lake. The joining of Sweden and Finland to the NATO alliance puts that whole enterprise in an entirely different light, and it enables citizens in countries such as Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia some measure of guarantee, which we, as Canadian citizens and North Americans, do not even understand. We do not get it.
For the Europeans, World War III has already started. They understand Bucha in a way that we do not understand it, because Bucha is on the main street to Vilnius. It is memorialized in the lives and deaths of those young Lithuanians, so we are, respectfully, quite naive about what this actually means.
My colleagues and I had some extraordinary experiences, but the one experience that really stayed with me was supper with the committee chairs of the Polish parliament, the German parliament, the Lithuanian parliament and a young Ukrainian MP who reminded me, frankly, of my daughter. I asked her how she was coping with this, and she said she was frozen inside because she had lost family and colleagues. She understood this in a visceral way that none of the rest of us do. The other experience that really hit on me was what the rest of us experienced, which was a young Ukrainian MP calling into the conference who had only five minutes. As she spoke, she said that her signal had been tracked and she needed to hang up the phone, and she went to the bomb shelter.
That is reality in the Baltic nations and Ukraine. I wish I could convey that to my colleagues and our nation.
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- May/12/22 4:45:37 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I chair the national defence committee. We have just done a threat analysis study. I think it will be an excellent report. However, we were distracted. The distraction was, naturally, to Ukraine, Europe and NATO. The threat of the Indo-Pacific was not dealt with nearly as well as it should have been.
I am assuming that your committee is much like our committee, challenged for time and challenged for resources, and not able to deal coherently with some pretty important issues.
That is the reason that I think this is not a bad idea.
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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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