Mr. Harkness:

We could save money, but not by attempting to repair worn-out trucks.

Mr. Dickey:

What about worn-out arguments?

Mr. Fleming:

Or this worn-out government.

Mr. Harkness:

Your argument is as worn-out as the trucks, and has as many holes in it.

Mr. Dickey:

Don't go away mad.

Mr. Harkness:

So far as the other shortages are concerned, I have not the slightest doubt that they existed. The minister does not seem to know at the present time whether they existed or not. I would think it would be up to him to see if that is the situation; and I will be interested to see if it is correct. He should try to find that out, instead of getting up as he did a while ago and making the blunt assertion that none of this is correct. Here is an observer, a competent man with considerable background. There is absolutely no doubt that he is not the type who would send in an utterly false report about these things he saw. He is giving a news report on it. And if the minister followed the reasonable procedure he would find out to what extent this is old and worn-out equipment, and to what extent proper equipment is supplied to these troops.

Mr. Claxton:

I do not know how far I need to go in following Mr. Senter in his trip around the world. But it does indicate how difficult it is to answer the reports of a reporter as quoted by a member. There used to be a pretty good rule that you could not read newspaper reports in the house, because they are not evidence.

Now, with regard to what he said about this exercise-I was not there and I have never seen the report to which reference is made, and to which the hon. member referred. It must have escaped me. But I can tell him I am informed that this exercise was not the biggest exercise ever held in peacetime.

Mr. Harkness:

That is how it was advertised in all the papers.

Mr. Claxton:

I am not responsible for the papers.

Mr. Harkness:

Your P.R.O.'s are, though.

Mr. Claxton:

Not at all. He says that there was no divisional artillery. This was a brigade exercise, with only three battalions who were to go to Korea. They are in Korea, and so

Supply-National Defence far as I know they are doing excellently. They were the three battalions of the R.C.R.'s, the P.P.C.L.I.'s-no, the Black Watch and the Second Queens-

Mr. Ferguson:

Who else, tell me?

Mr. Claxton:

And the Fourth Guards. These are very good battalions. They had a brigade exercise, but for the purpose of holding the exercise within the framework of a division they asked some reserve units to come in to form up the framework of a division. Any hon. member who served in any armed force in any war knows that you have exercises at the divisional level with sometimes no more than 150 officers present. That sometimes is done.

Then, the kind of remarks the hon. member has made about equipment-I just do not understand them, because we have no end of 25-pounder guns. We have given away probably a thousand. We have a surplus still, and they are available at command headquarters, as is all other equipment, for use by the reserves, as they can be used to advantage by them. It is not distributed to units beyond their capacity to use, store and maintain it, and that makes sense too, and that is because the reserve forces want it that way.

With regard to this business of equipment of the brigade overseas, I think the senior member for Halifax made a very good intervention, but the hon. member for Calgary North said that I should have made an inquiry and got a report. But I got a report of all this as soon as I saw the Senter piece. But I should like to refer to this against the background of the previous Senter piece:

Canadians draw Soviet interest as commonwealth exercises open.

That is the first part of it.

Canadians beat "desert rats", dominion's brigade in Germany excels in week-long commonwealth army exercises.

That was the second article:

Calgary units star in "War".

Canadian infantry put on good show against crack British in German scheme.

That was the third article. It was in this latter one that he dealt with equipment. Perhaps I will agree with the hon. member when he says that this was a good job and a very authentic and reliable reporter with regard to the first three articles, but when he comes to the fourth I must only assume that he has picked out bits and pieces of the kind of talk that you get around if you look for that kind of talk. This again is significant. I have the word of the chief of the general staff that any shortages that developed would be of a temporary nature only, and

Supply-National Defence would represent only the time necessary to call on reserves on the continent or in the United Kingdom.

Then a very big thing was made of the shortages of shoe laces. Well, now, shoe laces are not a very important element in fighting, but still it is a very important element in veracity, and I took this one up, too, and I had a signal sent across to the other side asking: "How many shoe laces have you got?" That is the kind of thing we are led into by this kind of talk, and I think it is a waste of public money. However, I found out that I have here from Brigadier Anderson in West Germany, a very fine officer commanding the brigade, information that we have a total of 5,206 pairs of shoe laces in the brigade, and I assure the hon. gentleman that there is no shortage.

Mr. Harkness:

The point is, when did they get them, after this article was written?

Mr. Claxion:

They could not get them after.

The hon. member made some remarks about anti-tank activities. Our troops are trained in anti-tank activities, whether they are armour, artillery or infantry, and that is about the biggest single item, the biggest single aspect of the field training that they have to do. How he can say they are not trained in anti-tank activities, I do not know, because he must have known. I have been at exercises at Wainwright and Petawawa and he must have been; I have seen them in Germany and seen them constantly in films that have been taken-there is a major field of continuous anti-tank activities. We try to have the latest types of training work, the latest type of dropping is practised, and they use the best kind of equipment.

Mr. Harkness:

On the basis of some five or six years experience of this, I can assure the minister that his remarks that everybody is trained in anti-tank activities and so forth merely indicate his complete lack of comprehension in regard to the role of these antitank guns and the methods of handling them, deploying them and everything else. When he says the infantry, the armour and everybody else are trained in the matter of antitank defence, he is talking about the medium anti-tank defence of a particular area where the platoon is or the company or anything else along that line. The very fact that he made that statement shows that he knows absolutely nothing of what I was talking about, just absolutely nothing.

Mr. Dickey:

Do you know?

Mr. Claxton:

I do not know what the hon. member is talking about.

[Mr. Claxton.l

Mr. Harkness:

The minister's remarks

prove that he does not know, or he would not have made the remarks he did.

Mr. Claxion:

He talks about heavy antitank guns. We have anti-tank guns as a part of the tank equipment in the Centurions, and they occupy today an anti-tank role. That is their role. If he is talking about something heavier than that-