Defending Canada at home and abroad
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
154.42459
Summary
The Afghanistan War Memorial was unveiled in secrecy, deep inside National Defence. Why did the government keep it a secret from the public? And why did it hurt the families of our fallen soldiers who were supposed to be there to honour them?
Transcript
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Welcome to The Blueprint, Canada's Conservative Podcast.
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I'm your host, Jamie Schmail, Member of Parliament for Halliburton Corps, the likes Brock in Ontario.
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You're listening to The Blueprint, Canada's Conservative Podcast.
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The cost of living keeps going up, deficits keep going up, and he has to raise taxes to pay for his out-of-control spending.
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The talk is cheap, except when this finance minister does it. It's very expensive.
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It's the fact that he punished two strong women for doing the right thing while he moved hell and high water
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to protect his buddies at SNC-Lavalin from facing a day in court.
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Welcome to The Blueprint, Canada's Conservative Podcast.
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I'm your host, Jamie Schmail, Member of Parliament for Halliburton Corps, the likes Brock in Ontario.
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With me this week is James Bazan. He's the Member of Parliament for Selkirk, Interlake, Eastman.
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He's also the Shadow Minister for National Defence.
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You know what? I don't even know where to start, believe it or not.
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The defence file has just been mismanaged from the beginning by the Liberals.
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So let's see if we can get through as much as possible.
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We'll start with the Afghanistan War Memorial, how that was laid out,
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basically a memorial that was unveiled almost in secrecy, deep inside national defence.
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The ministers seem to be very rattled by this and not realising the impact of actually keeping it a secret
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and why would that offend so many people, and rightfully so in my opinion.
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It's amazing that our Minister of National Defence, Arjus Sajjan, who served in Afghanistan,
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was so thoughtless in actually attending and approving the secret ceremony.
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That's the thing. He approved it and then attended that.
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This was in the works for weeks, and I can't believe that no bells were going off.
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But what they did instead was insult our veterans.
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and they put it in a location that Canadians can't go and visit unless they're now saying that you can go escort it.
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Well, it's still only certain times, and you're going to be escorted.
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You know, to put this in the Medal of National Defence Headquarters may be a good reminder for those that get to work in the facility,
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but it's about paying tribute and honouring those who made the ultimate sacrifice in the war in Afghanistan.
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And I think, you know, it comes down to it, the Liberals are embarrassed by our proud military history,
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And if they won't, we will when we form government in October.
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how did not one red flag go off in the minds of people when they read the rollout plan?
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That said, maybe families might want to be there, maybe the general public wants to see it at some point, without an appointment.
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Like, I just can't believe nobody said something.
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And, you know, again, we have General Vance, Chief of Defence Staff, that's taking the hit for this for Minister Sajin.
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And really, what we have is a Minister of Defence right now that is being more of a spectator than actually taking, you know, authority over his portfolio.
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You had a chance to make this right from the get-go.
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This is the Minister that said that he was the architect of Operation Meduza.
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And so for him to actually forget about the families of the fallen doesn't surprise me,
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since he has kind of a revisionist idea of his own personal history.
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I know that is very topical, but also very complicated.
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So, you know, Mark Norman has been asking for his job back.
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It's still, to my knowledge, still a no at this point?
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Definitely, Vice Admiral Mark Norman is asking to be Vice Chief of Defence Staff.
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The rules and regulations that govern the Canadian Armed Forces members and the ethos that they practice
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says that if you've been suspended and you get reinstated, you're allowed to go back to your old job.
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So he's in the right to ask to be the Vice Chief of Defence Staff.
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And he's had conversations with General Vance about his reinstatement.
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So, you know, we'll have to let this pan out on its own.
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But the reality is that we still don't have any answers about the political interference
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and the obstruction of evidence that wasn't provided to the defence team,
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to the RCMP who bungled this investigation from the start.
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It goes right to Justin Trudeau as Prime Minister,
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who threw a hissy fit when somebody leaked some cabinet documents.
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And so we had all these people that had access.
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And, you know, ultimately it comes to light that Vice Admiral Norman was just doing his job.
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And, you know, we actually have a ship now, a supply ship for our Royal Canadian Navy
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It was on time and on budget because of what Mark Norman did.
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Under direction by the cabinet, the previous cabinet.
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And so definitely it was the Harper government that ordered the ship.
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That at the time, Jason Kenney was Minister of National Defence.
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And then at the very first cabinet meeting that Justin Trudeau had after the 2015 election,
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that's when he tried to kill the contract at Davies Shipyards in Quebec City
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to build this brand new supply ship for our Canadian Armed Forces.
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And, you know, Mark Norman just did his job to make sure the ship got built.
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There's all sorts of other people out there, including one individual now that has been charged
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and is going to court as well, who also had the cabinet documents and turned them over to Davies.
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But it just proves the point that those papers, those cabinet confidences were in the hands of many people.
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And the RCMP went after Vice Admiral Mark Norman because Justin Trudeau told him to.
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And Justin Trudeau on two occasions, a year before and three months before the charges.
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Very publicly that Mark Norman was going to be charged.
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He also was interfering in the direction that was given to the RCMP on this
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and then withholding the evidence that they needed to properly conduct their investigation.
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And so that's why it is so important that we have a public inquiry.
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And I'm glad to see that our colleagues in the Senate are actually going to hold hearings on this
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during the month of June and try to get down to the bottom of how this miscarriage of justice occurred
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and how we go about making sure that Vice Admiral Mark Norman is reinstated and properly compensated.
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Maybe we can quickly touch on that, the Senate investigation that's going to happen.
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7 to 5, and it was good news because we tried to do it here in the House of Commons.
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Of course, Liberals have the majority, and they voted it down.
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And, of course, we just had a vote in the House of Commons for the production of documents.
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In particular, Michael Warnick, the former Clerk of the Privy Council,
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had written a 60-page memo about Vice Admiral Mark Norman
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and the asterisk replenishment ship for the Royal Canadian Navy
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And when it was handed over to the defense team, it was all blacked out, completely redacted.
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And if every line in that implicates the Prime Minister, the Clerk of the Privy Council,
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and their direction on the investigation and charges and the prosecution of Vice Admiral Mark Norman,
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But I think it's time that the truth comes out,
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and hopefully through the Senate process or through a public inquiry down the road,
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Now, has the witness list gone out for the committee yet?
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Definitely the motion calls for Vice Admiral Mark Norman
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and Chief of Defense Staff, Jonathan Vance, to appear, and Minister Sajin.
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He can't duck his responsibilities and duties to stand and be critiqued and questioned by parliamentarians,
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whether it's in the House or over in the Senate.
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They can expand their list of witnesses as they move forward.
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And they will be talking to Norman's defense team as well.
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You know, where is the safe zones to go that doesn't compromise Admiral Norman's ability to get his old job back
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and doesn't compromise his future legal recourse that he has with the government of Canada?
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But if we can kind of narrow down where we're at right now.
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Basically, we have our CF-18s that were aging and in desperate need of replacement.
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A line from the government that there's a capability gap.
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And then use that we buy Australia's CF-18s that are just as old as our current CF-18s.
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So as you recall, Justin Trudeau in the last election made a very ill-informed campaign promise that he would not buy the F-35.
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And so they had to figure out how they wouldn't buy a particular aircraft.
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One that's already being built partially here in Canada.
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They spent a bunch of time looking at what type of political narrative they got.
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And so all of a sudden, Minister Sajan came up with this idea of a capability gap.
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Completely fabricated, but one that they're hoping to get some traction.
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And if you remember, they said that we needed another 18 jets.
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And so to do that, they were going to buy Boeing's F-18s, the Super Hornet.
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Very modern and a pretty decent aircraft, if you look at it across the board.
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But then Boeing filed trade action against Bombardier for illegally dumping commercial aircraft into the United States, their C-Series.
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And because that blew up into a big trade fight, of course, Justin Trudeau, being the member from Papineau,
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we're not buying the Super Hornets because we've got to stand with Bombardier.
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And, you know, this corporate cronyism is something that percolates through every liberal government.
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And we saw it with S&C-Lavalin, that whole scandal.
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Bombardier, again and again, that corporate cronyism is impacting defense procurement.
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Completely politicized the replacement of our CF-18s.
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So the only option left now, if they're going to follow through on their, you know, fake capability gap,
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is to actually go out there and buy a similar kit.
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And so they went to Australia, who were going to scrap these planes.
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And essentially, the Australian Air Force is just laughing their heads off
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that they're replacing their Hornets with F-35s.
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Like, it's just ridiculous that we're buying old planes.
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Now, we've had a couple of reports come out that were very damaging to the Liberals.
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One is that the Auditor General in a draft report on the interim fighter jet purchase
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criticized the government for even thinking about doing this
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because under the Liberals and so much people are so unsure what's happening,
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pilots and aircraft technicians have been leaving in droves.
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And so we have a critical shortage of pilots and aircraft crew to keep our current fleet
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It's actually going to impact upon our operability, and thus, we're going to be less capable.
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What they suggested, as the Auditor General, was that we needed to move ahead with the permanent
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And I know that our pilots, if they knew they were getting new kit,
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they would stick around, and we'd also attract more people that would want to come fly new planes.
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Then we had McDonnell-Laurie Institute that wrote a scathing report.
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It was really damning upon the government because they, again, are using our armed forces
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That they have put their partisan ambitions and Justin Trudeau's stupid campaign promise
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ahead of the needs of the men and women who serve us in the Canadian Armed Forces,
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and in particular, those in the Royal Canadian Air Force.
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That type of political interference has to stop.
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That's why Andrew Shearer said that we're going to take politics out of procurement
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when it comes to our Canadian Armed Forces, and get the right kit so that our troops can do the job
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that we call upon them to do from time to time.
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Absolutely, because these men and women in uniform, they get put into harm's way
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at the request of politicians, and yet they don't seem to be getting the equipment they need,
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Like, it was under Kreishan we bought the old diesel subs from Britain,
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and we know there were some incidents with them.
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They were dry docked for a number of reasons, and now we have issues with planes, helicopters, ships.
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So it's no surprise that the Liberals always buy used.
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Liberals always put our troops to the back of the bus,
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and Canadians lose confidence in the government, the Liberals in particular, of getting the job done.
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We have to fix this, and that's why I'm proud that Andrew Shearer made a really strong defense
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defense and foreign affairs policy speech in Montreal earlier this spring.
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And that really set the standard of how our national defense is paramount to any government
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in protecting our citizens and working with our allies to make the world a safer place,
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But those investments have to take into reality the threat environment that we have today.
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We're not just fighting ISIS and al-Qaeda anymore.
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We have a very imperialistic and ambitious Russia.
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We have an emboldened China, and look at what they're doing to us on trade right now,
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just over Huawei and one individual who is on house arrest in Vancouver that is the CFO for Huawei.
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And they are prepared to use their economic muscle as well as their military muscle
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to exercise their dominance in the marketplace.
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And we're seeing them taking a more aggressive stance with their neighbors in the South China Sea,
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And then on top of that, you still have the craziness coming out of Iran and North Korea.
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And it's important that us as a middle power that's part of one of the main alliances in the world
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through NORAD, through NATO, through our 5I and 2I relationships,
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that we need to make sure that we're pulling our share of the load
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and having the right military equipment and the right trained Canadian Armed Forces.
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Because we have the best men and women in the military in the world right here in Canada.
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Let's make sure we're giving them the right equipment to do the job.
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That's so dangerous right now, and we need to be prepared to do that.
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Andrew Scheer has recognized that, and the Conservative government will get the job done.
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James Bazan, Member of Parliament for Selkirk Interlake Eastman.
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And thank you so much for joining us here today, and also, Shadow Minister for National Defence.
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Thank you very much for breaking it down for us.
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So I'm Jamie Schmiel, Member of Parliament for Halliburton, Korthalikes Brock.
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This is The Blueprint, Canada's Conservative podcast.
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And remember, low taxes, less government, more freedom.
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Thank you for listening to The Blueprint, Canada's Conservative podcast.
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search for The Blueprint on iTunes or visit podcast.conservative.ca.