It's difficult. As I say, you could say yes, we are ready, everything's fine, and just carry on. Or you could say no, we're not ready, as some of the previous presentations said, and the answer is a 9% to 10% increase in defence spending year after year, continuing into the future, which I don't think is realistic either.
I think the question, as I said, is being ready for what? It's defining our core capabilities. I think we owe it to our military services to say, as Canadians--we should involve the public in defining this as well--that this is what we see as the threats to our country that we need to defend ourselves against.
We also want to make contributions internationally. I think we're fundamentally internationalist people who support the United Nations. These are the missions and capabilities we want to do. If we can make that make sense within a fiscal framework, we should do that and make sure that our men and women in the armed forces have the equipment to accomplish those missions carefully. We should make sure that we choose those missions and those deployments very carefully as well.
I grew up in New Brunswick. A lot of my friends went into the military. A lot of the military folks are drawn from the Maritimes. That's where I'm from. They volunteered their lives. I have a lot of respect for that. They did that knowing that they would carry out their orders. But they had to be assured that the missions they were asked to carry out were absolutely necessary, essential, and that they were not the first resort but the last resort. That's the kind of social contract we have with soldiers. I think we need to bear that out.
If we don't have a clear definition of what we want our forces to do.... There are bound to be gaps that emerge as various special interests within the military establishment and elsewhere want to get their pieces of the pie funded. In the end, you just end up not doing anything very well. You're spread over too many capabilities.