Thank you for that question. It won't surprise you to hear that it's a question we are asked from time to time. I was recently asked by a professor whether the navy should maybe just get out of the Arctic and we should do the job up there.
My answer may sound a little bit cute, and I don't mean it that way at all. I hope you'll accept that sincerely.
As you will all be aware, the Coast Guard has been going through a very deep dive on our finances. We've been in critical financial straits for several years now, and we were invited, through budget 2016, to undertake a comprehensive review of our finances.
As an organization, and as the senior leadership of that organization, we believe that our priority is to become financially stable. This will allow us to have the resources to do the recruitment and the training to maintain the assets that we have, which, in terms of priority, are of an order of magnitude higher than discussions about machinery or where we sit within the construct of government.
We have very effective partnerships with the people we need to have partnerships with. That certainly includes the navy, Transport Canada, the RCMP and CBSA. There are different discussions that come to our ears about, “Well, wouldn't you be better off in Public Safety or wouldn't you be better off in the navy?”
We don't talk very much about where we live; we talk about what we do, and we think that the resource issue overshadows the machinery issue. That said, if we were to look at the feasibility of combining those organizations hypothetically, I think we would urge whoever was considering that, including this committee, to keep in mind that we don't have a military culture. We don't truly have a para-military culture. We don't have military training, although some of our training verges on para-military.
Regarding the prospect of the organizations merging, from a realistic perspective, you're talking about a fundamental change to the Canadian Coast Guard for it to be able to fit into the military or within the DND context. I don't think we could suggest that by any measure that would be a short-term transition. It would have to be measured in years, possibly a decade or more. However, as I said, we're not discussing this internally. We're discussing getting the organization on its feet to provide the services Canadians expect from us.