Thank you for your question.
As I said in my opening remarks, my experience is sort of varied.
I'm surprised to discover, given the variety of things I had to do as a diplomat, how much of it is useful in my current responsibilities. That's because of the tremendous diversity of tasks we've asked the Canadian Forces to take on around the world.
I spent some time working in Europe. I spent 12 years with my crew working in Europe. I've had to make two trips to Latvia, and I find that we have issues that deal with how the NATO relationship with the European Union is going to develop, particularly in the context of Brexit. We wonder how that is going to change both our defence relationship with the United Kingdom and the role the European Union is going to end up playing in national defence issues, particularly as the United Kingdom leaves. Perhaps there's a different balance of views within the European Union on how its own defence posture should evolve.
Indeed, NATO is constantly talking about how its own relationship with the European Union should work and what kind of partnership it should develop with the European Union. If you'd told me 20 years ago, when I was working on European issues, that these issues would come around in this context, I would have been astonished.
The experiences that I had working in the Middle East were some time ago now, but I'm surprised at how enduring some of the underlying issues are in the region. The disputes, some of them, are hundreds of years old, and they'll be with us a lot longer, so I'm not surprised that some of the same problems I was dealing with as a diplomat are coming back to play out again in a slightly different context.