“I'm skeptical of this big omnibus budget bill. I want more scrutiny and debate on defense spending changes. Hiding major restructuring in a giant bill like this avoids accountability.”
Official Hansard
Mr. Speaker, thank you for allowing my speech to bracket the all-important question and member statement periods. I will be splitting my time today with the member for Stormont—Dundas—Glengarry. I am pleased to rise to share my analysis of this important piece of legislation. I want to be clear from the outset that not all of this bill is without merit, but there are provisions within it that deserve serious scrutiny, serious debate and serious answers from the government. As a member of the Standing Committee on National Defence, I have a particular and direct interest in division 16 of this bill, the establishment of the Defence Investment Agency act and the amendments to the Defence Production Act, which would be renamed the defence and national security production and procurement act. It sounds complicated. Although buried as a peripheral issue within a budget bill, in reality this is a fundamental restructuring of how Canada processes and invests in its own defence, which deserves far more scrutiny than an omnibus budget process will ever allow. I want to be direct about something. I served nearly three decades in the Royal Canadian Navy. I served at CFB Esquimalt, one of the largest military installations in this country and the beating heart of our naval presence on the Pacific. It is a base that Vancouver Island depends on and has given more to this country than most Canadians will ever know. When I stand in the House and speak about defence procurement, I do not speak from a briefing note; I speak with 30 years of experience and of knowing exactly what happens when governments get procurement wrong. The government has this part of this bill catastrophically wrong. Bill C-31 is 330 pages long. It touches on everything. That is the first problem. Changes of this magnitude, such as giving a minister up to $1 billion in spending authority with no meaningful oversight, deserve their own bills, their own debates and to be studied in defence committee, not buried inside a budget omnibus bill that only gets sent to finance committee. When we bury such a key strategic plan, we hide it, and when it is hidden, Canadians cannot hold the government accountable. This is not an accident but yet another Liberal illusion. It is as if the Liberals have turned Parliament Hill into Emerald City on the Hill. They constructed a gleaming facade, the rhetoric sounds good, industry gets excited, and people are tricked into believing the illusion, while the Liberals ask Canadians to pay no attention to the wizard behind the curtain. Instead of the Prime Minister of Canada, perhaps we should refer to the position as the “Prime Minister of Oz”. My job is to pull back that curtain to reveal the reality and shatter the illusion. Let me speak to what the Defence Investment Agency actually is and what it is not. The Prime Minister has hired a CEO, a successful investment banker with no defence experience or procurement background who used to work alongside the Prime Minister at Goldman Sachs. He is now head of the new Defence Investment Agency. It goes further than that. In testimony in committee, this CEO admitted that in his former role as a top-level investment banker, he worked with high-value companies directly connected with the communist government in China. This is a serious security risk. On a file this sensitive, it is a detail we cannot brush aside. He also worked with high-value companies that have direct connections to the defence industry. This presents a very real potential for conflict of interest. This is not a risk Canada should be taking on one of the most consequential files this country faces, but here we are. The CEO of the DIA reports to a junior secretary of state, who reports to another minister, who reports to the Prime Minister, not at a cabinet table. There is no direct line of accountability or single point of authority. It is a rather confusing chain that only adds to more bureaucracy, red tape and delays and more boards, advisory committees, consultants and patronage. This is not procurement reform but the illusion of procurement reform. The Canadian Armed Forces cannot afford the difference, nor can Canada. Let me share some numbers with the House, because the numbers tell the story the government will not. Only 59% of our maritime fleet is serviceable and ready for operations, and that figure only holds because the government retired the entire Kingston class coastal fleet to make the math work. Of our 12 major warships, the navy, through no fault of its own, can barely keep three fully crewed, operational and ready to deploy. Only 51% of land vehicles are ready for troops to use. They are worn out and undermaintained. Over $2 billion a year was cut from defence budgets between 2021 and 2025. As for our aerospace fleet, only 42% of our aircraft are ready to fly. Our CF-18s are nearly aged out, and we still do not have a signed contract for the F-35s because the government spent years playing political games with the air force. I will leave the government's failure to keep our beloved Snowbirds flying for another debate. The brave men and women who serve at CFB Esquimalt, who serve across the country, deserve better than 42%. They deserve better than 51%. They deserve more than only three operational frigates. They deserve a government that signs contracts, shows stability and has a realistic strategy to build upon, not the illusion of reannouncements and press releases and fancy-sounding new layers of bureaucracy. It has been more than four years since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, four years since we heard the language of putting Canada on a war footing. In four years, the only increases in the production of munitions, artillery shells and rockets in this country have come through contracts with the American military, not for Canada but for America. The government never signed the contracts for our own requirements. We can announce an agency. We can name a CEO. We can create a board. However, until we put ink to paper and actually buy the equipment our forces need, we have done nothing. Division 16 of the bill does not fix this. It locks in the inefficiencies. It entrenches the old bureaucracy. It gives the minister the power to exclude companies from competition without ever explaining why. It creates the ability to sole-source contracts without accountability. It grants authorities to procure shares in corporations and to replace directors and officers, language that sounds an awful lot like nationalization. We have been down this road before. It is called the Emergencies Act. This reeks of the same unaccountable overreach. In clause 310, there is more sole-sourcing. In clause 322, there is a competitive process riddled with exceptions so wide that almost anything can be exempted. In clause 312, there is ministerial power to replace corporate leadership at will. There is no transparency, no explanation and no accountability. Here is the foundational problem that makes all of this worse. Canada has no national security strategy, a strategy that should be the key foundation upon which the defence investment strategy and the Defence Investment Agency should be built. Without a national security strategy, none of this works. We cannot design a procurement architecture for a mission we have never defined—
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