Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and through you, thank you to our witnesses.
First of all, I wish to thank General Semianiw for providing the opportunity to see first-hand how our joint personnel support units are functioning. Just to follow through and ensure that everything I heard that day was as good as it sounded, on Remembrance Day I had the opportunity to speak to some of our soldiers who had been very gravely wounded and were missing more than one limb. They confirmed that upon arrival in Ottawa, a support worker from the JPSU was there to help them from the outset. Their goal is not only to get better, but they also expect to be deployable. Thanks to our wonderful care, that may be a possibility.
I'd like to talk about one thing we saw that day.
Often there are positions that cannot be filled by military personnel; for example, there are some clerk positions that are filled by civilian employees instead. I want to give you a brief account of why I want to know the answer to this question. I'm looking for the number of positions that have been replaced with civilian employees over the last five years. In Ontario the situation for the army is that the civilian population of employees seems to have grown quickly, whereas in reality some of this growth may be from the substitution of civilian employees for military employees.
What we're seeing at the Petawawa base, for example, is that because you want to keep the number of new hires flat, the tradespeople who are civilian employees are being let go, and that really has an impact on the welfare of our troops. You know that infrastructure predating World War II costs a whole lot for repair emergencies and preventative maintenance, and it costs more to hire a contractor than a regular employee.
Do you know the answer to that?