James Bezan

“Mr. Speaker, despite all that growth, somehow Public Services and Procurement Canada lacks the staff to renew the defence contracts. I am not buying that, and neither should Canadians. Even if it were true and the government were issuing fat contracts faster than staff could keep up, it becomes a matter of triage on priorities. National defence is supposed to be the highest priority of a national government. Contracts to secure enough bullets and bombs should always be at the top of the pile. Instead, the priority of the defence department goes to the sole-source contracts hiring American diversity consultants. One of the recommendations Conservatives have made to fix the bill is to establish a secretariat inside the Privy Council Office. This would do more to ensure that defence procurement is a priority than would Bill C-31 and Bill C-40 combined. We know this from our experience in Afghanistan. Under Stephen Harper, defence procurement was a real priority of the Privy Council Office. That is how we rapidly procured 651 light armoured vehicles, 500 tactical armoured patrol vehicles, 100 battle tanks, 37 Howitzer guns, 21 Chinook helicopters, 17 Hercules aircraft, 16 route clearing IED devices and five Globemaster aircraft. That is a real record with real results. The Liberal record is one of delay, deny and deflect. The decision to delay the completing of the F-35 contract is not based on what is best for Canada’s national security. It is about what is best for the political interests of the Liberal Party. The threats to Canada’s national security have not diminished since the Conservatives left government. They have grown. Anyone watching the defence committee yesterday or anyone reading today’s editorial in The Globe and Mail knows the truth. The threat of war is very real. Our soldiers were the tripwire in Latvia but now are at an even higher posture. Our sailors ply the Taiwan Strait, yet the government seems more keen on doing business with the very countries we might find ourselves in conflict with. There is a real urgency needed to rebuild the Canadian Armed Forces after a second Liberal decade of darkness. Instead, the government wastes time trying to figure out the difference between a Crown agency and a Crown corporation. The Liberals have us debating legislation rendered moot by the next bill they introduce. This is no way to run a lemonade stand let alone a NATO member country. If this is how the Prime Minister ran the Bank of England, it is no wonder the U.K. crashed out of Europe. It is clear from the bill before us and Bill C-40 that the government does not know what it is doing. This is not the quiet competence of a central banker but the desperate hustle of an investment banker caught in a stock market bubble. All his foreign trips and fake summits are meant to create the impression of action, the illusion of substance, but photo ops do not put bullets in the rifles or jets in the sky. The Liberal Party famously ran a campaign with a platform listing out 40 priorities. If it has 40 priorities, then it has zero priorities. Conservatives understand that national defence is the number one priority of a national government. It is time the Liberals learned that lesson.”