Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Minister and officials.
I want to pick up on three things from across the way, just to allow some clarification, the first being from Mr. Coderre with respect to the Chinooks. You didn't have an opportunity to respond to that.
Obviously the Chinooks are not bought simply for Afghanistan; they're bought for the next several decades. And we're buying Chinooks with long-range fuel tanks. Obviously Arctic sovereignty is going to take a prominent role in our plans for the future, and there are things like natural disasters, ice storms, floods, you name them, where we previously had used U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force Chinooks and C-17s, but now we have our own.
So could you comment briefly on the utility of the Chinooks for much more than Afghanistan?