That seems to be the saying of 2021. I apologize.
I stand to be corrected, but my understanding is exactly yours: that the appointment made by the Harper government in 2015 was open-ended. In other words, there never was a question of extending it. He would continue in office until someone said, “That's it, we're going to have a change of command”, reverse-engineer from that date and start a succession process. In 2018, at the time we've been talking about, the general had been in his office for three years. The convention was four or five.
I think if you look it up, you'll see that some were four and some were five. If you do the math on it, that meant he would come up at four or five years in 2019 or 2020. With a fixed election date and a no-fly zone in the fall of 2019 on major appointments, it effectively meant that a decision had to be made as to whether he was going to be a four-year guy or a five-year guy. Was the process of change of command going to take place before the election or after the election? That was the basic sort of.... There was never an extension, and the promotion that he got from DM 2 to DM 3 was way back in 2017, after two years in office.
The issue of tenure was whether the government should pick a date for a change of command and start a search process for the next person. That was the gist of the advice and the content of the note that I sent—that the Privy Council Office sent—to the Prime Minister regarding General Vance in early July 2018. It had two things in it. One was the recommended rating for 2017-18, which I'm happy to talk about. Then it raised the issue of tenure and offered the Prime Minister the choice: Do you want to take this on in 2019 or in 2020?
By that time, the issue of the general's interest in the NATO position was a factor, and also what was starting to become a very rapid turnover in the senior ranks of the military, and I'm happy to talk about that as well.
