Discussion · Government Orders
James Bezan Conservative
“The previous Conservative government actually grew military spending and bought new tanks, planes, and helicopters. We did not inflate our numbers like the Liberals do by counting thousands of Coast Guard workers as military defenders.”
“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.”
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.