The point is not that there aren't inefficiencies, and it's a whole other question as to what that means. I'll come back to it. The point is that in all these cuts.... When I joined the armed forces a long, long time ago, there were 125,000 people in the armed forces. We had ships and a navy with aircraft carriers and great big fleets of fighter airplanes and all kinds of other planes. We were deployed. I and a lot of my colleagues were deployed with 10,000 people in Europe. We had nuclear weapons. Now we have maybe 67,000 people with very old equipment, old aircraft, and so on. So the capabilities—and therefore our readiness to do things—have been gradually going down.
So when governments are looking for a pot of money to advance needy projects—old age insurance or whatever, things like that—the defence budget is a discretionary budget. It's not hooked into statutes or anything else. It belongs to the federal government and it's a pot they can go to—and that they have been going to—with promises that finding efficiencies will make up for lack of money. They do it again and again and again.
Unfortunately for Mr. MacKay, in my view, he is at the end of a game of liar's dice here: people have been passing the cup around and around and around. You can't do transformations, find efficiencies, and take money out of the budget when you've already spent all the efficiencies. Not to be too simple, it's like a family that has a lot of debts and is paying them off by selling the furniture. Well, we've been selling off the furniture for a long time, and now the bill has come in again and we don't have any more furniture to sell. There are not that many bases you can close. In 1994 they closed and reduced in size 14 bases.