We have some data that I'm more than happy to share with this committee with respect to those deployments. I think the Canadian Armed Forces members have been absolutely extraordinary, and every time we've asked them to answer the call, they have done so. However, there are a number of reasons men and women join the Canadian Armed Forces. Part of it is because of the excellence of the training, and part of it is the opportunity to serve in a wide variety of deployments.
This year was a particularly challenging year. As the general has shared with us, there were 130 consecutive days of firefighting. That wasn't all done by one group of soldiers, or all by soldiers, and we tried to rotate people through different missions. For example, I remember the discussion during the summer, when we had fires in Nova Scotia, Quebec, Alberta, British Columbia and the Northwest Territories, and I think there was a very sincere effort made to make sure people were rotated through those, because we had to give them a break. We also did not want to take them away from training.
In my conversations, I've gone to the bases and I've thanked them for that service. I think they are proud and they should be proud of the service that they provided, but it isn't entirely consistent with all of the reasons they joined the Canadian Armed Forces. We have to be thoughtful of that, because we want to regroup those people; we want to retain them, and we want their experience in the Canadian Armed Forces to be something they can be proud of. They are certainly proud of the service they brought to Canada. They're proud of supporting Canadians in a dire time of need, but they also want the opportunity to deploy internationally and to be involved in a lot of other important missions.