Yes, Mr. Chair, of course I agree.
What Ms. Murray depicts is not the reality that I encounter when I visit our bases and see the pride of our Canadian Armed Forces personnel in presenting, and talking about, and demonstrating their new equipment.
Just to give you one example, in CFB Trenton, your base, it's one thing to buy the C-17s, and not just four of them, but now a fifth one.... That fifth one, by the way, now means that we'll be able to have three of them operational 90% of the time , meaning that we can respond to multiple crises concurrently rather than getting in queue.
There was a deliberate policy decision of the previous Liberal government, a deliberate decision, not to have strategic airlift. I don't know why. Is it because they didn't actually want to have to say yes when urgent situations arose?
But not only did we acquire four, we acquired a fifth so we can actually have a strong appropriate maintenance rotation cycle. We didn't just acquire the planes. As you know we built an enormous hangar, two cutting edge maintenance hangars, for the C-17s at CFB Trenton.
Just look at the simulation equipment for training our pilots that we've now installed at CFB Trenton. These are very expensive systems that, by the way, are expensive up front but efficient in the long run because it's more efficient to train pilots on simulators than burning aviation fuel.
Wherever I go, whether it's visiting HMCS Chicoutimi, the modernized and refitted Victoria-class submarine in Esquimalt, or HMCS Calgary, or see at Garrison Petawawa the incredibly sophisticated new howitzer artillery pieces they have, everywhere I go I see new kit, highly motivated personnel, and a military that appreciates the fact that the Government of Canada is actually willing to use our military assets appropriately and prudently to protect our security, collective peace, and respond to humanitarian disasters.
I just ask people to compare our ability to respond the Nepalese earthquake versus the gong show of the government response to the tsunami in southeast Asia in 2005. The difference is investments in equipment. Of course, the personnel have always been professional but now they can actually get to where they need to go.