I understand that we don't have a heck of a lot of time here. I will try to make this concise.
I'm very concerned about what the future security environment entails because Canada is no longer as safe as it once was or once thought itself to be. I believe the Canadian Armed Forces is going to be increasingly called upon to address security threats around the world and to protect Canada and Canadians here at home.
What is the plan to do that? Over the course of the pandemic, we have shrunk. Our readiness has been reduced. Last summer I issued a Canadian Armed Forces reconstitution plan. That plan focuses on rebuilding our strength, but not in the same way. It is to be focused, to be oriented to those threats that we're going to face in the future.
Of three priorities, number one is people. Right at the top of that list is changing those harmful exclusionary aspects of our culture, addressing some of the real challenges in our society right now—the cost of housing and the cost of living, which are one of the major dissatisfiers that I see as I travel around the country—and rebuilding our strength and getting our numbers back up there.
The second priority is operations, being ready to respond to the plethora of hot spots we see around the world, the constant demand for Canadian Armed Forces intervention.
Finally third is modernization. We cannot take our eyes off the future. We can't mortgage the future to pay for the present. We must continue to get those projects that are in our defence policy and continue to focus on continental defence and what we need to do, looking at our force structure and perhaps changing some of the structure that's been in place in place for 70 years, since the industrial age, and getting it better ready for the information age.
What this means, though, is that we have to put the concepts in place, as well. You talked about cyber. That's one of the new domains I'm quite worried about. Space is the other. We have to better integrate those domains—land, air, sea, cyber, space, information—to really have a pan-domain approach, an integrated approach as we approach the challenges of the future, because our adversaries are doing just that.