Yes, thank you for the question.
We have a variety of tools that we use to determine whether or not we've achieved a readiness objective. They appear inside the service chiefs'....
I think you will be speaking as committee with the commander of the army. If you speak to the navy and the air force, they will be able to describe to you in great detail the link between resources and the production of a ready asset, and the reporting of that to the Canadian Forces—which ultimately rolls up, and which I look at and examine. That is done on an annual, cyclical basis.
Now there are exceptions. When a major fleet modernization is needed, such as with the Halifax-class ships right now, a service commander alerts the Chief of Defence Staff, perhaps through me, that there is some sort of impact on readiness. I'll do my best to answer it, but that's a great question for the service chiefs. They all have slightly different tools, because they are different services, to describe and assess their state of readiness. The air force would use a tool set to describe and assess their readiness versus the army, which would be quite different. But there are tool sets.
On the ultimate arbiter or determination of whether we are ready, it gets rolled up and reported to the CDS, and my staff matches that, as do others, against what we're supposed to be ready for.
You asked, “If we took $10 million or added a percentage into it, how would we know that we were better?” That's a good question. We would first have to accept that money, with an understanding of what it was to be invested in. Is it a one-time amount of money, or is it added to your baseline? What is the policy of the government that you're trying to achieve? It would have to be defined. Once it were defined, we would build a plan that included measures of effectiveness, and would report back on it.
So all of that happens. I know it was a theoretical question: if you put more money in, do you get more readiness? The answer is yes, if readiness were your plan. If you put more money in, would you get better wounded support? You would, if that were your plan. It depends on where you want to put the money. It depends on what the plan is.
We can show on an annual basis that money in equals readiness across the board, and in all of the other things we do. We can show that, and we do annually to Parliament.