Very good. Thank you very much, Chair.
Thank you, all, for attending today. We appreciate it very much.
I have to say when this first came out, my first thought was the poor previous government couldn't buy helicopters and they couldn't buy jets, and it turns out they couldn't even buy houses. I was very distressed to see that after so many years, decades into centuries of having a Canadian Armed Forces, something as basic as where our soldiers live is not a highly tuned, accurate, pretty ongoing, run-of-the-mill procedure and policy, and a top priority. Yet one doesn't get that sense looking at all of this. I have to tell you it's very disappointing.
I suspect there is a lot more attention paid to maintaining tanks and equipment than there seems to be around providing proper and adequate housing for our service personnel.
When I look at the Auditor General's quotes, this is not small stuff. This is pretty damning. The Auditor General said in his report:
Overall, we found that the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces...did not comply with key aspects of its military housing policy. We found that National Defence did not clearly define its operational requirements for military housing.
This seems strange because operational requirements is an area in which they would have great perfection, you would think. “We also found that, at some locations, it did not consider how the private housing market could meet” some of the needs, and that goes on in great detail. Again, that doesn't sound like such great, deep original policy thought—duh—what's already out there might be available. No, this is pretty common-sense stuff.
I will read the response from Mr. Jones: “It's why our housing program is about so much more than putting a roof over a soldier's head. It's about contributing to a better quality of life for the men and women who serve and defend our country, as well as their families.” It's absolutely true, but at this stage, it's a lot of bromides. That should be the starting point, not the answer to why we have these problems.
Before I get into any minutia, and I'm probably not going to have a whole lot of time and I accept that, but I'd like to hear once again some kind of a snapshot explanation for the Canadian people of how the hell we got into such a mess in something that is so fundamental to our armed forces, who are the actual citizens who put on the uniform every day. How did we get here?