Might I make a suggestion regarding your future endeavours? This to me is an issue that is of major concern. The last thing we would want to say is “Oh, well, we just didn't get around to it.” As Mr. Merrifield said, this is extremely important to the Canadian public. We have no greater service as parliamentarians than towards the health, safety, and protection of our citizens.
In this particular case, we want to be more than adequately assured that our different departments cooperate and have an effective plan to be able to deal with this, rather than working simply in isolation. We have seen instances in which the cooperation between the different departments hasn't been extended. That just might be something that you consider for evaluation.
The second point is in regard to the transportation of military goods. I'm very fortunate, in that I live right beside Trenton, which of course is now the air transport capital of Canada. Therefore, I've seen not only our new aircraft in operation, but also the enormous plans for warehousing, for shipping, for storage, for inventory control, for management, and for staffing. While we have some inadequacies in inventory control, overall it's very good, but everything is being shipped out of the country. I think domestically we're doing a pretty good job.
You mentioned that most of our problem appears to be at the point of destination, rather than at the point of origin. But if that's the case, as we move to this much more expanded and capable role of core centralization so that we can have better control, if we've been able to extend that level of efficiency out, I'd like to be able to see us down the road say that we have a benchmark now, and ask whether we have made significant improvement. I really believe our infrastructure spending now will help accommodate that, but it would be good to see that we have some form of documentation on that as well.
Thank you.