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Alex Ruff

Member of Parliament
Member of the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians
Conservative

Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound
Ontario
Voting Attendance: 68%
Expenses Last Quarter: $91,173.06

Government Page

Apr/5/22 4:07:08 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, again, it is not an easy answer, but it is all of the above. We need to invest in our recruiting. Almost a decade ago, I tried to write a master's paper, and I failed miserably at that too, specifically about why we need to invest our best people within the Canadian Armed Forces into the recruiting system so we have that flexibility to recruit the best. As we all know, the huge labour shortages the country is facing, it is a shortage across most of the western world, so we have to get those right people. The other key aspect the government could do to help fix this is on the procurement side. One of the things that we are actually lacking within the government, in my opinion, is enough expertise within defence procurement alone. If we can invest more to get those quality people into that, it would allow the procurement cycle to improve. By investing in training, investing in support for families and investing in our members, we can never go wrong.

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Context: House Hansard - 53 - Apr/5/22

Mr. Alex Ruff

Apr/5/22 4:05:13 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I have a brief response. I cannot even pretend to get into all the nuances and complexity of what the member is asking. I spent a year on an army defence procurement project. In my experience throughout my military career, the biggest challenge we had, and I think this probably exists in a lot of departments, was that we felt that if we did not spend it, we would lose it. The member's idea of carrying forward does not truly work, definitely not within DND. When it comes to these defence procurement projects, the real challenge is the political interference. I believe this so much, and I do not mean they do it on purpose. It is because we can get into this idea of why this project is what we need. We can look at previous parties during different elections, with different campaigns and how they ran on certain things, but ultimately they need to get out of that. That is why I believe in non-partisan or bipartisan defence policy and foreign policy.

178 words

Context: House Hansard - 53 - Apr/5/22

Mr. Alex Ruff (Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound, CPC)

Apr/5/22 1:16:57 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I appreciate the parliamentary secretary being up front in his support of our Canadian Armed Forces and this motion. My specific question for him is around his role as the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Public Services and Procurement. If we are going to get that 2% spending, a large proportion of it is going to be through procuring the right equipment in a timely fashion. I would argue that historically, regardless of the stripe of government over the past number of decades, part of the reason we failed to expend all our defence money was because of political interference in our procurement process. What is the member specifically going to do in his role as the parliamentary secretary to speed up and facilitate our procurement process for the Canadian Armed Forces?

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SoVote

Member of the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians

Alex Ruff