Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'd like to give a brief thank you to my fellow colleagues. I was away two weeks ago and received some very nice messages from everybody with the loss in our family. I passed those on to my family. I want to say thank you and that I recognize the outreach and outpouring of love.
To our witnesses, I'd like to say thank you very much for your service. I'm very grateful to have your perspective here with respect to what has happened and the challenges we're facing with wartime recognition of service.
Rear-Admiral Summers, I'm going to ask a question and I'm going to follow up with a bit of a statement. Would you say that we are allowing other governing bodies to dictate what we as a nation should be recognizing as wartime service? I ask that because you talked about the United Nations and about resolutions. We as a nation adhere to a lot of international bodies with regard to what war is and what the rules of war and engagements are. I know that Canada is very sensitive to that because of the way we want to be seen in the world.
Would you say that this is something that is impacting the decision being made with regard to recognizing the Persian Gulf as wartime service for our vets?