First, it helps the Canadian Armed Forces, and I'm really going to just speak about the army reserve here. It helps because tapping into communities, beyond the traditional French, English, white communities, you're obviously opening up the potential of the bigger pool, so you can attract more recruits. That's good. Units can grow that way. They know that and they're working on it.
Second, for the nation, I think it's fabulous because—I could talk for 20 minutes about this—new Canadians are given an opportunity to participate in an important national program. I'm sure they feel better about that; so many want to do that.
The other big thing that I think is really important to the Canadian Armed Forces is the potential of those communities to assist in achieving the missions that the army and the rest of the forces have to achieve.
For example, on overseas deployments, it's important that you can work with the local population and there are lots of places where most of us don't speak those languages. However, somewhere in the Canadian mosaic there are people from that community and we need to bring them in if we can. We have to identify them as well and I don't think that we.... Certainly, in the recruiting process the individuals are asked, I suppose, what language they speak, but that is just the two official languages. I think we need to do a better job about it.
I have anecdotal stories about the deployment in Afghanistan. We had people there who pretty much spoke the local language but nobody knew about it. That's a terrible waste if that goes on.
I think there's enormous potential from the point of view of the units themselves. They want to do this. I think it's good for Canada, but I also think that if we knew what we had or had a better idea of what—I'm sorry, I shouldn't say “we”. If the army had a better idea of what they actually have in their inventory of personnel, I think it would be incredibly helpful.