Thank you, sir.
First, you talk about tempo. I don't think we can sustain the present tempo. The army cannot, in my view. We need a period of R and R to stop people from doing five deployments in Afghanistan, which will be the case by the time we get out. We can't sustain that. The tempo is something that must be slowed, whatever happens.
I obviously have a preference for a NATO operation over a UN operation, simply because it will be better led. It will be more efficient. It will probably be more politically attuned to us than the United Nations has been. UN operations, by and large, have been a shambles, and there's not much chance of them improving, given the political realities in New York. If there are two operations on the table, I would take the NATO one rather than the UN one for the practical command, control, and political reasons.
My preference is that we think in terms of the hemisphere first. We are part of the western hemisphere. We are part of North America. The government's current defence policy is called the Canada First defence strategy. It does not seem to me that is misnamed. That should be our policy. What affects us? What is directly in our interest?
Something close is in our interest, in general, more than something on the other side of the world. I qualified that in my comments by saying that some parts of the world are very dangerous and we have a clear national interest in stopping war from exploding. But in general, in North America, the Caribbean, the hemisphere, that's where our interests should lie.
A place like Haiti, which is in chaos, and was in chaos before the earthquake, is a threat to us because of the flood of illegal immigrants it can produce, because of the chaos it can engender, because of the disease and the generalized mess that can spread everywhere. It is not in our interest to permit that; it's not in our interest to see that continue. If we can help, then clearly we should.
Does that require the military, necessarily? Perhaps not. Perhaps it needs a more focused, better-funded CIDA to go in and do a major job of work in a place like Haiti. Those are questions the government has to decide. But I think that location, that crisis, is something of real concern to us.