Thank you, Chair, and congratulations on your election as chair. I look forward to working with you.
Thank you to our witnesses. Thank you for your presentation and your report. I would actually love to have you back to talk about that in some greater detail, particularly the world involvement. I agree with you in terms of the articulation of a vision and your recommendation that there should be an overarching white paper to talk about all these strategic issues. I think it's overdue. However, we're doing the defence of North America, and if I may, I'll focus on some issues associated with that aspect.
Part of the overriding criticism of Canada in terms of defence policy is that we're spending a lot of money. It may be the right amount, it may be too little, it may be too much, but we're spending a lot of money. The question is this: what are we getting for it, and are we spending the money on so many different things that it's not clear whether we have our priorities right?
We had Assistant Deputy Minister Jill Sinclair tell us that as far as she was concerned from the departmental policy point of view, Canada faces no current state threats. The DG of the Department of Foreign Affairs for intelligence security told us the same thing. That leaves some of the other ones—terrorism, narcotics, etc.
First of all, do you agree with that first statement? Second, if we're going to focus on, say, Canada's defence needs within that context, where would you focus? Do you think there are four or five areas we should take as a priority and make sure we get done first?