I think it's a crutch. I think the army takes a good shot at you, but not a great one. Then, once it's given that shot, off you go.
There's a term they have that we call “being on category” and people will cringe when they hear it. Essentially, you get an injury and they give you a temporary category or a temporary suspension of duties while you're getting fixed. There's only so many of those you can go through until it becomes a permanent one and then the permanent one gets assessed. Is he in or is he out?
At the height of military engagement in Canada, during World War I and World War II, we still had over 30% of our force here. This idea that World War III is going to take every single one of the 30,000 reservists and 68,000 regular force and put them in a country tomorrow, it's just not believable. If it were believable, are there really 1,300 every year?
I would buy it, if that number was 40. If we had done a head-to-toe on that person and said there's just no way. I'm telling you that there is a way because one of the jobs I was put into while I was going through that category, once they released me, they then had to transfer a guy in to fill it. There's another family relocation that didn't need to happen. I did the job for two years while injured, proving that I could do it. Then I get released and another family gets uprooted from eastern Canada and sent to western Canada to fill a gap that wasn't there.
The gap that was there is the policy of universality of service. I don't deny that the CDS needs the authority to be able to make sure he's got a fighting force up to a certain percentage and that certain people can't do it, but it's being used way too much, sir.