The 22,000 troops who were on standby to support Operation LENTUS, and specifically Operation Laser, is about one quarter of the entire deployable force, once you factor out people who are on medical leave or otherwise constrained.
Inherently, that is a very significant commitment. It is also part of the reason why the Canadian Armed Forces drew down some of their international commitments, precisely so that the members and the assets could be available if called upon to support domestic operations.
The question going forward is the trade-off that I tried to raise in my presentation between those domestic deployments and inherently, those assets not being available, as you point out, either for international operations, or possibly a worst-case scenario where we have critical, urgent international operations. It may coincide with a high demand for domestic operations, or multiple demands for domestic operations, such as a pandemic combined with floods or firefighting.
The fact that the Canadian Armed Forces had to essentially cannibalize their own medical services in order to backstop the issues raised by provincial policy—what I would call provincial failure—raises some very difficult questions for the Canadian Armed Forces, because it now means what capacity...If you had told someone in the Canadian Armed Forces two years ago that they would be going into long-term care homes, somebody would have had you committed to an institution. It would have been literally inconceivable, but of course, the Canadian Armed Forces have to be there to ensure mission success for the Government of Canada.
If you have constant resources, now you have very difficult conversations about what sort of backstop capacities the Canadian Armed Forces need to build for possible future domestic operations. God knows what other types of policy failures by provincial governments in terms of critical infrastructure we may be facing, for instance. That means that those are then investments the Canadian Armed Forces cannot make in international operations, or in continental defence for that matter.