That's a very good question, and I thank you. It gives me an opportunity to highlight what a lot of Canadians wouldn't have seen, and that is the work done by the Department of National Defence behind the scenes.
At many of the venues in Vancouver and also in Whistler, most Canadians, most athletes, and those participating in the training would not have known that there were literally thousands of Canadian Forces members working in concert with police, both municipal and RCMP, behind the scenes providing security, in many cases camping outdoors in the woods, participating in patrols on both skis and Ski-Doos, given the weather conditions at the time, and also doing a lot of marine patrols around Vancouver harbour along with the air patrols performed by CF-18s, refuellers, and other aircraft.
It really was a classic example of a whole-of-government effort in which the Department of National Defence had a supporting role for the police and the Department of Public Safety, which had the primary responsibility for security. There were a lot of lessons learned, a lot of new initiatives that have come about with respect to winter training, and I would even call it a reinvigoration or an awakening of the necessity to do more of this type of activity as it pertains to the Arctic.
So we've taken some of those lessons learned already. We participated just this past winter in a number of exercises with our Canadian Rangers north of 60 in a number of Arctic communities. We benefit exponentially from the experience of the rangers and the ranger program. We also have this capacity to work in concert with other departments--not just on the public safety side--in support of search and rescue, as we were speaking of earlier, and in support of the presentation of these large international events.
Just looking at a calendar, you would see that we literally rolled from the games in Vancouver, both the winter games and the paralympic games, right into the preparation and the execution of the G-8 and G-20 summit. That was again a multi-venued event that required a great deal of effort on the part of the Canadian Forces. There were thousands of them in a low-key, low-visibility role in support of police, and in most cases they were living outdoors, living in tents around the venues, working very much in concert to ensure the security of those participants and those world leaders who were there, and working very hard to see that they dissuaded anyone who wanted to cause harm to or to disrupt these important international events that were taking place in our country.