Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Gentlemen, thank you very much for being here, for your service to our nation, and for sharing your expertise. It's much appreciated.
I'd like to start with the dichotomy, if there is one, between domestic and international operations. You made a very compelling argument that, in light of our coastline and the complexity of our threat environment, we need to do more to defend Canada here at home. However, then we have international operations, and many Canadians may see that as something that detracts from our ability to do sovereignty assertion or defence at home.
I'm wondering if you could give us a bit of a flavour of what international naval operations are about, what our allies are thinking about our navy, what they say we should do more of or less of, and highlight the complementarity between international operations and good domestic security and defence.
That's the first sort of category, and then I'm hoping to get to some human resource-related questions.