Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'm sometimes in a slight conflict between my role as an opposition member and as a former defence minister. I think the latter may win—at least for my first question.
Mr. Staples, on the subject of the size of defence spending, I totally reject the notion that Canada is a big military spender, because the sensible way to look at this is expenditures as a percentage of GDP, which tells you how much you're spending relative to your total economy, and Canada is about the lowest—or one of the lowest, other than Luxembourg—in the whole of NATO. If you look at the numbers you had up there, we might rank eighth or something like that, but when we're $10 billion and the U.K. is $50 billion, they are much less than five times bigger than us in terms of GDP or population. So overall, we're a low spender—but getting bigger.
I find it very difficult to believe that in a meaningful or comparable way our spending is really going up from $15 billion to $20 billion in two years. Can you explain those numbers, please?