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James Bezan

Conservative on Government Orders 2026-11-03

Replying to Blaine Calkins (Conservative)

“Madam Speaker, I would like my colleague to remind the House what exactly it was that Stephen Harper inherited when he became prime minister in 2006. I remember our troops being in Afghanistan in green combat uniforms and Iltis Jeeps. By the end of that combat mission, our troops were some of the best prepared and best equipped in the world. The Liberals talk about the 1% of GDP, but the GDP grew so much when Stephen Harper was prime minister that actual defence spending grew by over $4 billion a year annually for our troops. This information can easily be searched. At the current rate of economic collapse in this country, 2% of the Liberals’ GDP is probably going to be less than 1% of what Harper did.”

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Madam Speaker, my colleague from Ponoka is completely right. Not only were we growing the budget, we were growing the investments in the Canadian Armed Forces and making sure they had things like new LAVs, new tanks, new TAPVs, new Chinook helicopters, new Hercules aircraft and new C-17s. All that had been bought, and our actual increase in defence spending took us up to over 1.4% under the old system, where we only calculated defence spending and did not add in, as the Liberals have done, everything from the Canadian Coast Guard. We just saw a story in Blacklock’s this week that 7,378 Coast Guard employees are now national defenders, even though none of them are paramilitary or trained in the military and have told us at committee over and over again that if they came into conflict, they would leave the scene of the event.