I'm sure you will. Thank you very much.
Mr. Fadden, it's great to see you again, and thank you for being here.
We've been studying over the course of the last several months, the military readiness, and we've seen some significant inadequacies with the shortfalls we have in personnel. We've now moved into this study, and I think they overlap.
After last week's committee meeting—we had Major-General Prévost and others here—I received some correspondence from someone within the military. They said the following: “Perhaps some of our leaders are too far removed from the reserves to know what's really happening. A division—and I'm not going to mention it—has lost over 400 reserves in the last three years because they're fed up with the governance mandate for the military. They didn't join to clean up domestic disasters; they joined to protect their country. We've never been so vulnerable and so woefully inadequate. Others countries are protecting our north because they know we can't. Championing the military will do wonders for their morale, because it's at an all-time low. Life on the base is very different than in Ottawa. If you want to get answers to your questions, ask those on the base, not Ottawa.”
What are your thoughts to those comments coming from our own members of the armed forces?