Thanks very much, Mr. Chair, and thanks to the witnesses for being with us.
Moreover, thanks to all three of the gentlemen for joining us at the Halifax International Security Forum for a great weekend. MP Fisher and I were very pleased to welcome you and other members of the committee to our part of the world for some really important dialogue. Thank you very much for that.
The flavour of my inquiry is going to be this: Does the increased operational tempo of Lentus point us to the conclusion that response horsepower other than in the CAF is needed? I want to see your thinking a bit with respect to a couple of things.
CTV recently reported—reporting on your remarks, I believe, Minister—that there used to be “between five and 10 formal requests for [federal] assistance from the provinces and territories each year.” However, between March 2020 and October 2022, “there were more than 200 requests”, 157 of which involved the military. We saw, just in Nova Scotia, 700 members deployed for Fiona. Just in Nova Scotia, we saw 450 deployed for Dorian. It's not just personnel. It's ships like HMCS Margaret Brooke. It's fixed-wing aircraft. It's helicopters. It's right down to chainsaws. It's equipment otherwise deployed that's being diverted. It's service members otherwise deployed being diverted. It's that their training may not be exactly what is required, and we saw that there was some retraining required on site.
I guess what I want to ask you is this: What is the specific nature of the challenges that this raises for the CAF and its members, and how do you meet those challenges? How does that tie into what else is needed, if it's something different, like non-profits and so forth?