Arnold Viersen

“Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the MP for Calgary Midnapore. I rise on behalf of the women and men of Garrison Petawawa and the wider Ottawa Valley community to express my deepest condolences to the families of the four soldiers who lost their lives and the 39 people recovering. When tragedy strikes, the loss is felt deeply by all those in the Canadian Armed Forces, especially by their families and their loved ones. Private Shaun Farrell, Private Hayden Lykkemark, Private Aidan Goulding and Sergeant Morgan Wong fell serving their country. Their loss is a stark reminder of the dangers we ask the Canadian Armed Forces to undertake every single day. We owe our seats in this chamber to the sacrifices made by those serving today and the veterans who went before them. We can never repay the debt we owe to Shaun, Hayden, Aidan and Morgan. What we can do is live up to the example they set of being of service to our country. As members of His Majesty’s loyal opposition, we are called to serve by holding the government accountable. It is the duty of the government to appear in this House and give that account. Anything less is a disservice to all Canadians. What we owe Canadians, and particularly the members of the Canadian Armed Forces, is the certainty that we take the nation’s defence seriously. The Liberal government has tabled Bill C-40, an act respecting production, procurement and investment in relation to national defence and national security. The Liberals’ chosen short title makes the purpose of this bill clear. It is called the “strengthening Canada’s defence sector act”. It is not the “strengthening the Canadian Armed Forces act”. It is not the “speeding up defence procurement act”. It is another Liberal industrial strategy dressed up in a military uniform. There is a reason prime minister Brookfield appointed a bank president to lead the Defence Investment Agency instead of an expert in defence and security. This is all about making Liberal insiders richer. Between pressure from our NATO allies, the aggression of Russia and insults to our sovereignty by the U.S. president, the Liberal Party now supports increased military spending. The Liberals saw the commitment to meet our NATO targets as an opportunity to cash in, and that is what this is really about. The Liberal talking points claim this bill is meant to help speed up defence procurement. Of course, this is what the Liberals said a year ago when the Prime Minister created a new bureaucracy within public works and called it the Defence Investment Agency. Six months later, the Liberals said it needed to be a stand-alone agency. A year later, the Liberals are claiming this needs to be a Crown corporation. Changing the agency to a Crown corporation would not fix defence procurement because it would not address the root of the problem. As long as the Liberal Party of Canada continues to exist, the Canadian Armed Forces will struggle. From Pierre Trudeau scrapping our aircraft carriers to Jean Chrétien scrapping the EH-101 helicopter and Justin Trudeau whipping out his pen to cancel the F-35 procurement, one party has repeatedly campaigned against defence procurement. Not only did Chrétien and Trudeau actively campaign against military purchases, but they both won majority governments from those campaigns. Those campaigns sent a loud message to the defence sector and the public service that a delayed procurement is better than a negative headline. Even today, while the Liberals claim to care about meeting spending targets, the Liberal Prime Minister has placed the F-35 procurement in jeopardy. The F-35 review is not making Canada secure. The review is not because the defence department has discovered a new advanced jet it did not know about before. The only reason for this fake review is that it is politically convenient for the Liberal Party of Canada. The Liberal government is willing to sacrifice national security to keep its elbows in an upright pose. These posers do not care about national security if it risks the poll numbers. I wish this was not the truth. I want the government to succeed in buying the kit that the soldiers, sailors and airmen need. In some ways, this bill could actually be seen as a way to get most of the Liberal Party out of the way of the defence procurement. By creating a Crown corporation and a single responsible minister, it may get the industry minister to stop meddling in defence purchases. Unfortunately, this bill’s multiple mandates would replicate the same whole-of-government incoherence with a single Crown corporation. Even worse, the new power this Crown corporation would have to make equity investments in defence companies would be putting the entire organization into repeated conflicts of interest. How could this defence Crown agency corporation invest in a company while running a competitive procurement process that includes the same company? The only answer is that the government would have to sole-source the projects. Who needs a competitive procurement process when they own a piece of the bidder? Obviously, sole-source contracts are rife for conflict and corruption, but Canadians may even forgive the Liberals’ lining their pockets if at the end of the day, the women and men of the Canadian Armed Forces were provided with the very best equipment in the world. Instead, the Liberal government procured winter sleeping bags that do not work in the cold. Once the government is a shareholder of a company that no longer has to compete for government contracts, is that company going to invest in research and development, or will it follow the lead of the government’s newest sole-source defence contractor, Maritime Launch Services, and cash in its stock options? This bill has less to do with our national security strategy and more to do with the Liberal defence industrial strategy. Rather than taking President Eisenhower’s warnings of a growing military-industrial complex to heart, the Liberals are taking it as a how-to guide. While there is more of a case for government intervention to maintain critical defence capabilities, this bill would go well beyond limited interventions. For example, there is a strong case for providing market security and long-term sustainability for armaments by expanding munitions stockpiles, yet this bill would allow the minister to stockpile anything the Liberal cabinet decides is in the party’s interest. Another example was recently provided by President Trump. On the same day the Liberals announced this bill that would allow them to buy equity in defence companies, the U.S. president announced the U.S. government was taking a 40% equity stake in a defence company redeveloping an old naval shipyard. The President argued that its equity stake would commit the U.S. government to keeping the facility operational forever. As President Trump said, he and the Prime Minister “agree on many things”, and that includes taking equity stakes in politically sensitive companies. I disagree with the Prime Minister and the President. I appreciate the argument that this type of investment commitment can ensure the long-term stability needed to keep a critical factory in operation, yet as Ukraine’s heroic defence against Putin’s aggression has shown, the pace of technology and technological change is only accelerating. What is critical today may be obsolete in 10 years, but the contracts and scarce dollars will keep flowing to outdated factories because the government owns a piece of them. Even if people support the government taking equity stakes in defence companies to secure currently critical assets, surely they would at least agree that there should be some constraints. Under this bill, there would be no limits. As the head of this defence Crown corporation, the Prime Minister’s close personal friend and highest-paid government employee could buy 1% of a drone start-up or buy 100% of Stelco. That is an extraordinary amount of power to grant the government. Not since World War II has the government nationalized a company without introducing specific legislation. Given how poorly the Liberals managed their national electric vehicle industrial strategy, if we grant the Liberals this much unaccountable power to implement their national defence strategy, all we can be certain of is that vast amounts of money will be spent while leaving Canadians with little to show for it. The Liberals can continue to reannounce new strategies to speed up defence procurement, but the real problem is staring them in the mirror. This Liberal bill is a confession of Liberal failure. It is an admission of Liberal guilt. We owe it to the women and men of the Canadian Armed Forces to get them the best equipment, not the best investment deal.”