There are a couple of things in that.
First of all, let me take the opportunity, Mr. Chair, to say that last time I was before committee, General Eyre and I were discussing the challenges of the Canadian Armed Forces in recruitment and retention. We articulated that over a three-year period, we actually had more people leaving the armed forces than we were able to recruit.
We believed, and the General shared with us, that we'd reached the bottom of that and were turning the page and starting to move forward. Unfortunately, I want to report to this committee, because it's important that we be candid, that this continues to persist as a challenge for us. I met earlier today with the chief, the deputy minister and his staff, and General Bourgon with respect to recruitment and all the efforts we are doing to expedite those processes. We need good people in the Canadian Armed Forces and we need to retain the great people that we have. I just wanted to be really clear on that.
At the same time, we're very fortunate in this country. We already have an extraordinary group of Canadians who fight wildfires. They're volunteer firefighters, professional firefighters and municipal firefighters right across the country, almost 130,000 of them. They do an extraordinary job, for which we should all be very grateful. At the same time, we've seen that on occasion, particularly with how bad the fires were in the past year in Nova Scotia, in Quebec, across the prairie provinces, and in Alberta, British Columbia and the Northwest Territories, we needed to provide them with additional supports. When they came asking, we tried to be very careful about how we deployed those resources, not to replace those firefighters but to provide the support and services they cannot provide.
For example, the Canadian Armed Forces were there when communities needed to be evacuated. When people needed to be evacuated from Yellowknife, one of the largest municipal evacuations in the history of this country, they were there to help with that. They were the only ones who could.