FILE PHOTO - Kelowna Liberal MP Stephen Fuhr

Image Credit: X.COM/Francisco Smith

Kelowna Liberal MP Stephen Fuhr was sitting in front of a stack of binders Wednesday as he waded through his new task of rebuilding how this country buys things for the military.

Prime Minister Mark Carney picked his cabinet on May 13. He selected 28 ministers, along with 10 secretaries of state who aren’t technically members of the cabinet but play supporting roles. Fuhr was one of those secretaries of state and he’s in charge of defence procurement.

“The interesting thing is that we're not just going to buy a whole bunch of stuff that we need to meet all our commitments," Fuhr told iNFOnews.ca. The government is creating the defence procurement agency from scratch.

The government is taking a different approach to meet the NATO spending target. The goal is to spend two per cent of Canada’s Gross National Product, or GDP, on national defence. In previous governments defence procurement has often been one of the responsibilities of a deputy minister to the minister of national defence.

The plan is to create a new structure with its own authority and its own purse, Fuhr said, but the details haven’t been ironed out yet since it’s his second day on the job.

“We have to build this agency to facilitate military procurement in a way that is quicker and more beneficial for industry and respectful for the taxpayer and solve all these problems and make it happen faster and do it in a way it's never been done before,” he said.

Fuhr spent 20 years in the military. He was a pilot for several years, but he also spent time working the back end of the military in operational headquarters and he was chair of the National Defence Committee. 

READ MORE: Kelowna MP gets supporting role in new Liberal government cabinet

He said he speaks the language, the army jargon, that will help when it comes to sifting through reports and understanding presentations about what the military needs.

Something that he’s going to have to figure out is balancing his job to advocate for Kelowna as an MP with making sure taxpayers around the country get the best bang for their buck. Local company KF Aerospace has contracts with the Royal Canadian Armed Forces.

“KF is like a premier aerospace company in the country. They do great work. I'm quite familiar with their work,” he said. “The types of work that they're interested in, obviously, they're going to express that interest . . . My role as an MP would be to advocate for them, and I had done that in the past, but now I wear this different hat. I'm not quite sure how that interaction will look moving forward.”

FILE PHOTO - Kelowna-based KF Aerospace will be maintaining the RCAF's new surveillance plane the Boeing P8-A Poseidon. It will be replacing the aging Lockheed CP-140.

Image Credit: SUBMITTED/KF Aerospace

Specific scenarios regarding Kelowna companies bidding on defence contracts could be different and he has some extra work to do, but Fuhr said his role as an MP advocating for his riding isn’t going to be impeded by his role as secretary of state.

“My ability to deliver for Kelowna hasn't changed. I would argue that it's gotten better because I have even better access than I did before. So, I can get to decision makers quicker,” he said.

He said cybersecurity is something that’s on his radar but it’s another area where there are still specifics to figure out.

The elephant in the room, when it comes to Canada’s national defence, is the dynamic with the President Trump.

“The Trump administration is operating differently than any other administration that we've ever dealt with,” he said. “I think we're going to have a relationship with the U.S. There's no question about it. As the Prime Minister said, it just will look different looking forward. It has to. You know, the Americans are still our friends. And I don't think that's changed.”

A shift to a more self-sufficient approach to Canada’s defence is something that maybe should have happened before now, he said.

“We just have to have more independence. And one could argue, we should have done this a long time ago,” Fuhr said.

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