I fully acknowledge the problem you describe, namely, the problem of caveats as part of local NATO operations. This is one of the underlying reasons that maintaining a general-purpose force is always attractive, precisely because you never know who you can rely on for these types of operations.
Unfortunately, you have to look at this in light of the resources you have. It's tempting to say we're going to preserve a general-purpose force that can do everything it needs to do, but if that force's capability is gradually declining, you will necessarily become dependent on others at some point. So the idea that you could preserve some kind of independent deployable capacity is already problematic, at least in a Canadian context, and we see this happening across the board within NATO.
My basic answer to that problem is to have a more honest assessment of who you would work with and under what conditions. The government has the ability to negotiate memoranda of understanding and other agreements with key partners on how they might use their forces and in what context. I think we can safely assume that certain partners we've worked with in the past and depended on consistently would be the types of allies with whom we would negotiate these types of agreements.
Knowing the particularities of German or French domestic politics could lead us to shy away from negotiating sharing agreements with those allies. On the other hand, when we look to the United States, Great Britain, the Dutch, or the Danes, we see a certain continuity of deployment and willingness to share resources. Those might be allies with whom we can try to arrive at some arrangements. We see this consistently on the naval side, and we see it on the air side with the United States and other NATO allies. For instance, NATO has always cooperated on strategic airlifts.
The question then centres on the capabilities that Canada feels it could contribute alongside certain allies in order to pool resources. This could take many different shapes and is something we need to bear in mind. It doesn't necessarily have to be front-line forces. Canada can provide different types of capabilities with other allies filling other niches that may be more sensitive.
We see the United States moving in this direction in its latest defence strategy, along with Great Britain and France. We also see some of our other allies cutting into their planned defence procurements in the future. If all allies begin cutting capabilities and attempt to maintain some kind of general-purpose force, the ability of the alliance to operate without cooperating will be far more problematic. We need to have this discussion and see if certain allies are willing to commit in solid agreements to certain types of arrangements with Canada.