I appreciate your comments, and I want to say, Mr. Williams, I enjoyed reading your book. I found it quite enlightening.
Further to what Mr. Hiebert was saying, the whole contrast I got on that particular passage you wrote is that the strategic capability investment plan, which is now I believe called the defence capabilities plan, didn't highlight some of the things that were being proposed politically. The bottom-up process of creating that military wish list and the top-down political drive sometimes don't marry up, and that causes the delays.
My experience working in the government has been that when we knew a minister was arriving, quickly all the buildings would be painted and the trucks would be washed and everything would look good; the grass would be cut. The minister shows up and the brand-new shiny stuff is all there; we have our nice little celebration, and the minister drives away, thinking, “Look at that, everything is hunky-dory and everything is fine”.
I'm wondering if you could elaborate for us whether sometimes the bureaucracy or the ground level gets in the way of informing at the political level of what actually needs to be done. Is that part of the problem? How do we solve that problem of the bureaucracy getting up, the politics getting down, and finding that common ground?