You're not looking at a huge investment, because much of this, as our colleagues have already said, is run by volunteers. The challenge is that you need the right surge capacity at the right time. Currently, we don't have a good model to get the right people to the right place at the right time. The Canadian Armed Forces becomes the fallback, essentially, for providing that surge capacity until other organizations are able to take over when no one is stepping up.
It's not just with NGOs. For instance, you may remember that earlier on in the pandemic, the Canadian Armed Forces helped evacuate Canadians who were then quarantining on the Trenton base. That was supposed to be done by a different entity. That entity wasn't able to deliver on time, so the Canadian Armed Forces took it on, not because they really wanted to do it but because there was no one else to do it.
I think there need to be other people who can actually do things in a very quick and timely fashion. In that regard, to Madame Normandin's point, yes, we talk about the Canadian Armed Forces as a force of last resort, but if you look at my study, Madame Normandin, we have an increasing number of occasions when provincial and territorial entities are calling on the Canadian Armed Forces, even though we can demonstrate empirically that they have not exhausted all of their resources. Essentially, they become a quasi-emergency measures organization.
It's important for the federal government to draw a much clearer line to say that it's not acceptable for the Canadian Armed Forces to be used as a provincial emergency measures organization to supplement capacities. It needs to be a force of last resort. The problem is that this is increasingly not happening.