Thirdly—and then I'm going to save some time, I hope, for my colleague Ms. Gallant—we keep talking about this tired old 10:1 ratio of spending in Afghanistan, and I'm frankly a little bit disappointed that the parliamentary budget officer seems to have fallen prey to that same misunderstanding. A dollar of money spent on the military isn't just paying for the military. When a dollar is spent on the military, some of that $10 to $1 is being spent on development and reconstruction, and so on; it just happens to be carried out by men and women in uniform. We consistently make the false argument that we're spending $10 on the military to $1 on construction, when in fact a good chunk of that $10 on the military is in fact reconstruction, development, and so on.
On February 9th, 2009. See this statement in context.