Mr. Chair, if I could just make a brief comment, there's a demographic problem here. It's nice rhetoric in a big meeting, but when people talk to me about recruiting and the armed forces, and so on, I ask the question, who fights for Canada? Young white men, that's who fights for Canada. The armed forces is composed mainly of young men. The disproportionate number of people in the armed forces are young white men. More than that, they're young white men from small villages--lots from the Maritimes, some from the prairies, and some from Ontario and Quebec. But 50% of the Canadian population are women. The armed forces is made up of 15% women. The aboriginal community in Canada is, according to the last census, 4%, 5%, or 6% of the population. They're less than 1% of the armed forces.
The changing nature of the Canadian demographic is going to be a problem in the future if this carries on. When you ask people the reason for this odd distribution, you get remarks such as it's racist or we're not accepting, and so on. I don't think so. I think it's a pretty damn hard life. A lot of people would like to do other things.