My suggestion is that we could actually save some money by using the coast guard or developing the coast guard and having it partner with the Canadian Forces. One needs to think about this in terms of what it actually takes to provide a presence and also an interdiction capacity, because in the Northwest Passage, it's the ability to actually stop ships that will be the ultimate test of Canadian control there.
What you need for that are helicopters. You need to be able to put a handful of armed sailors onto the deck of a cargo vessel. It doesn't really matter which department actually owns the helicopter as long as the sailors get there.
The problem is that we've been draining the coast guard of resources for decades now. The helicopters on the icebreakers are old Messerschmitt helicopters that Karlheinz Schreiber helped us to buy. They have a range of only 350 kilometres, and they carry only four passengers. A Cormorant helicopter, by comparison, can fly over 1,000 kilometres without refuelling and can carry up to 30 passengers. They're serious long-range maritime helicopters. We need new helicopters for the coast guard and, ultimately, also new icebreakers to replace what is a rapidly aging fleet. The Louis S. St-Laurent is forty years old now, but we don't need this $700 million plus Cadillac of the Diefenbaker.
The other thing that people need to realize is that you can actually double-hat either Canadian Forces or Canadian Coast Guard personnel. A coast guard captain could be a naval reserve officer, just like a coast guard officer is often also double-hatted as a fisheries enforcement officer. You don't need necessarily to have dedicated, solely military personnel to fulfill a lot of these functions. You need more partnership, more focus on efficiencies, more thinking about putting multi-purpose platforms into the Arctic and focusing on what is the real need, which from a sovereignty perspective in the Northwest Passage again is being able to put those four or five sailors onto the deck of a non-compliant cargo ship, not a Russian destroyer. We're talking about a non-compliant, single-hull tanker flagged with a Liberian flag and a captain who doesn't want to comply with Canada's Arctic environmental regulations. That's the real kind of challenge we face.