Thank you, Chair.
Thank you for joining us today.
I suppose if we're starting to compare ourselves to the Americans, it's no comparison, since they spend, I understand, more than everybody else in the world combined for their own superpower or strategic reasons. I don't think we hope to, or would want to, try to compete with that on a per capita basis or otherwise.
I want to get down to some specifics here. You were asked some questions about the reserves, and I know the reserves are very important, not only for support in Afghanistan in terms of 20% of our capabilities there, but they're also important to our capacity. I'm just looking here at a sheet on the navy and naval reserves indicating that for active personnel it's 10,900, and reserve personnel are 4,100, so obviously the reserves are a very important part of the overall commitment. But I keep hearing, and it's anecdotal, from one part of the country to the other--and various members of Parliament have mentioned it to me--that the reserve budgets are being cut or the training allowance is being cut, people are being laid off, or even just the training budget is being cut.
I understand you're trying to avoid affecting operations, but can you tell us what these adjustments actually have consisted of in the last year? “Adjustment” is a nice fancy word probably for reductions in expenditures. Can you tell us what the reductions were from the beginning of the year, what the allocation was for the year, and what was adjusted downwards over the year? Can you give us those numbers?