Thank you.
Gentlemen, one of the matters appearing in the estimates this year that is somewhat bothersome, and is stated in fact in the reports on plans and priorities, is that the government is reducing the amount of education reimbursement to regular Canadian Forces members by changing the funding levels for reimbursement to people taking courses.
This program provides a $2,000 reimbursement for courses that people undertake, and it has been important to a lot of people. General Devlin said in a report that funding available for training has been reduced, resulting in nearly one-third fewer individual training and leadership courses. This is a pretty significant reduction in what's available to Canadian Forces members.
In fact, it goes against what the department said in responding to this committee's report on readiness when it said that the Canadian Forces maintains a significant...and it believes that education of soldiers is important to readiness. That appeared in paragraph 13 of the government's response to this committee's report on readiness.
Can someone tell us why we are reducing the amount of support for individual soldiers who are continuing with education and learning about things that are important to them? For example, and I will quote from section 13:
...the Government continues to make significant investments to ensure the continued delivery of complete spectrum of individual, collective, academic and specialized skills training and development activities.
It recognizes that training is “an essential aspect of the readiness” of the Canadian Armed Forces.
Why are we reducing that? Why do we have General Devlin saying that one-third less training, in that sense, will be offered to individual soldiers?