- Member of Parliament
- Liberal
- Scarborough—Guildwood
- Ontario
- Voting Attendance: 62%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $111,926.23
- Government Page
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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- 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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