My big thing, I think, is that when you look at the mandates of the CAF you see there are about eight of them, and a lot of them are domestic like search and rescue, guarding coastlines, NORAD. Then, domestic emergency response is a very specific one. However, there's no parallel about, okay, this is the mandate and we're going to generate these forces, and we need to have this many navy ships, this many soldiers.
It leads to this vagueness that there's no corollary about what the military does have to build in terms of forces generated to do domestic emergency response. I think that there, combined with this societal growing expectation that the military is going to be called in to respond every time there's a domestic emergency, it's really draining the organization a little bit. I think it's creating confusion.
There's a big debate about what a military is and isn't. I think the generals and others are talking about the need to have this political decision, and I think it does start from the top. We have to more clearly define what we want our military to do, what we want to focus on, what we want to build.
Do we have health care capacity, just a service in military, or do we decide, you know what, we're actually going to build up health care capacity in the military to service domestic emergency response?
We have an example of the DART, the disaster assistance response team, which is an expeditionary overseas capability. Do we want to build a domestic DART or something in the military?
I just think this has to get beyond the confines of DND and become more political and public as we enter the engagement about the defence review.