Thank you.
Thank you all for being here today, and to my old boss, General Thibault, thank you, sir.
First of all, from reservists, thank you very much, Minister, for following through on your commitment to reservists in your announcement today on being able to top up employers to help the reservists deploy. As we know, on most missions, approximately 25%, give or take, are reservists, which is very important to the Canadian Armed Forces in our ability to carry out our missions abroad. Reservists step forward, and they make sure they contribute to that, and they do a professional, outstanding job. By doing so, you're also helping great organizations such as Canada Company's Captains of Industry, which originally started a lot of this as interested individuals and has carried that on, and tremendous groups such as Treble Victor Group and True Patriot Love Foundation, which just yesterday donated $5 million for the care of many of our veterans.
Thank you, on their behalf, for that.
For a former reservist, as you pointed out, it's very gratifying to know that program's in place, because trying to get.... As a former commander of a unit, I know it's very difficult to sometimes raise the strength to send out on deployments, and this makes it easier for reservists to be able to deploy, to do that job, and assure that employer that they're going to get back, and be assured they're going to get that employer back.
Just shifting quickly to Operation Reassurance, I have spoken to some troops who have done this. There are some intangibles that have come through this operation, and besides the very important assurance to our Baltic neighbours, in particular, Poland, where they're positioned, this is something that turns out to be tremendous training for our troops in terms of wings exchange, some of the cross-cultural training that they do with the Poles, with Lithuanians and other forces, and the British and the Americans who are stationed there as well. This is something that develops our troops professionally abroad. That's an impact we're having there right now.
I talked to a Polish three-star last night—who, by the way, learned his English here in Canada—and we are reaping the benefits of those relationships because Canada helped many of those Baltic states through the Canadian Forces College, through language training and through other professional development training, which helps our forces today to interact and interoperate with those Baltic states. So I'm very pleased that this is happening, because our troops are actually having a very rewarding experience in participating in those operations.
Sir, we didn't talk about today's LAVs and the upgrading of the LAVs within the estimates. Can you describe to us what the value is to our troops in upgrading those LAVs?