Thank you very much for that question.
I apologize for not replying to you
in French.
To begin with, we have a lamentable inclination to freeload on our structural or institutional arrangements, particularly with the United States, and that, I would suggest, is a strategy that is rapidly becoming endangered. Americans have significant challenges of their own in order to meet the defence demands of a global power.
Second, I would suggest that all the evidence suggests that what we're looking at is a declining level of vitality in the Canadian economy.
Third, at the very moment that we might begin to turn the corner—and there are some who would suggest that the decline in armed forces is so profound that it is incapable of being reversed—there are some who would suggest that at the very moment we begin to make real inroads in the deficits that successive governments have left us, we will in fact find ourselves without sufficient revenue to continue in the way that we were before. If you look, for example, at standards of living, we've fallen from fifth to 33rd globally. This is all a warning sign of our lack of competitiveness moving forward.
National defence is in real trouble, but it will be in even greater trouble if we don't move with enormous rapidity and urgency now.