Thank you, sir.
I will respond to your first question first, which concerns planning between the United States and Canada.
You're referring to a document that was a plan signed into place in February. It's called the Civil Assistance Plan. It's not the means by which American forces could operate on our side of the border; it is a plan to allow effective coordination if there were a requirement established by the government for one or the other to draw upon aid.
The Civil Assistance Plan really brought together many of the arrangements that already existed into one more efficient mechanism by which collaboration could occur. It's not an agreement and it doesn't allow the movement of forces. It's a plan. The movement of forces occurs when the governments decide that's what they want and they request and an answer is given. The Civil Assistance Plan simply puts in place a more efficient means by which we can execute that order.
As I said at the start, there is no doubt that we are engaged in very deep conversations with the United States to understand what capabilities they will put in place and to ensure they understand what capabilities we have in place. I envision no circumstance at the moment that would see dramatic movement across the border one way or the other, but, sir, you're asking me to predict the future, and we're all notoriously bad at that. What that plan puts in place is an efficient means by which military-to-military cooperation could occur were a decision made by the governments to do that.
I would make the point that it's perhaps surprising that we've gone south of the border more frequently than we've seen it happen the other way around. In fact, the first exercise of the Civil Assistance Plan, based upon a request made by the United States government to Canada, was us going into the United States in anticipation of Hurricane Gustav. We deployed a C-17 aircraft and took patients who were medically at risk out of New Orleans and flew them to Little Rock, Arkansas.
That was a request of the American government, approved by the Canadian government, but the mechanism of the CAP, the Civil Assistance Plan, allowed the effect to be brought to bear within two hours of the request having been made.
The formalized mechanism happens because governments decide. What the Civil Assistance Plan puts in place are many of the things that had been there before. I took a task group into the Gulf of Mexico many years ago as a result of the devastation from Hurricane Katrina. The Civil Assistance Plan establishes the mechanism by which, once the approvals are in place, coordination can happen more efficiently.