Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Through you, to our witnesses, thank you very much for coming today. Everything that you've had to say so far today has been of great interest. We've been at this readiness study for some time. Increasingly, I'm concerned that we embarked on a study that is going to turn out to be, frankly, a monumental waste of our time.
That concern is heightened today when we have an expert panel before us, and Professor Bercuson started off by saying that you're not even sure what the term means, and Professor Roussel suggested that it doesn't have a translation into the French language.
I recently came across something that I found interesting and helpful in, of all places, the Australian Journal of International Affairs. A couple of academics have put together a methodology for getting to this issue of readiness. I think they defined it as capabilities, and what we are engaged in here is a kind of capability assessment.
In the study—I'm simplifying this probably unfairly to them—what they identify is that before you can even get to the question of capability assessment, you have to deal with the issue of identification. I guess it's threat or, in their terms, they prefer to look at it as vulnerabilities. From that assessment, one goes into a risk assessment. Then you can start talking about readiness.
All of this seems to suggest to me that we've leapt a couple of steps ahead in this study, and we need to go back and think more carefully about the threats or vulnerabilities, and the risks that those pose. It's a quantification or even a qualification of those risks.
My question for you, after that long preamble, is really one of methodology. I'm not asking you about the risks themselves, but in light of your comments—especially yours, Professor Bercuson, and your iron law of history—how would you recommend that we go about getting at this policy issue? I think it's the policy issue that's looming large here. How do we go back and start this again to get to that capability assessment?
Is there a method, Professor Bercuson and also Professor Roussel, that we should be looking at or that the government should be employing to get us to a point where we can have a sensible discussion about capabilities?