If you look at the data of why the Canadian Armed Forces is called on the most, it's for general labour, lift capacity and specialized expertise. Being able to ensure appropriate lift capacity from the Canadian Armed Forces and that that capacity is available when required.... By and large, lift capacity is probably not something that's going to be provided by NGOs, and the private sector is going to have limited capacity to provide it. This is always something that the institution of the state, either through the Royal Canadian Air Force or other capabilities, will need to ensure.
There are certain specialized capabilities that we need to give very serious thought to, because the Canadian Armed Forces, for instance, doesn't have supplementary health capacity that it can simply deploy to the provinces. That's a zero-sum game where you pull people out of operations they're performing in in order to deploy them to the provinces. We need to look very carefully at where these specialized capacities are that are effectively resulting in zero-sum games, to ensure that we have fallback capacity in the NGO and civilian sectors so that we don't need to cannibalize the Canadian Armed Forces from current operations where members are serving, domestically or internationally, in order to respond to immediate domestic urgencies and requirements.
I might add this. You're from Alberta, so you'll be familiar with, for instance, the Fort McMurray flooding challenges. This is a great example of critical infrastructure that doesn't get the attention it needs. It is years behind. A disaster could have been averted if we had stayed on time and made a commitment to ensure that it got built to protect the municipality. However, it wasn't a political priority.