Mr. Speaker, I would like to commend the hon. member who just spoke for his clear and precise position on maintaining the troops now in Bosnia. I share his concerns when he asks if we can simply abandon a civilian population to people who want to carry out ethnic cleansing, as he said.
He talked about civil defence, but I would like to come back to the last part of his speech when he spoke of the financial burden. Yes, some people do wonder if we can still afford such a peace force. There is that strain of opinion, that questioning. In his argument, he did not point out that we could perhaps completely reorganize our armed forces so that a section of them, as the speaker before him said, would be specifically trained to keep peace and also restore peace. For this, perhaps an exhaustive study should be done on all the equipment we are using. Maybe the equipment we use on such missions could be more narrowly focused and specialized since the missions are increasingly difficult. For example, my colleague spoke just now about logistics; maybe we could become logistics specialists and let other countries provide other kinds of support, such as medical support.
For that, perhaps our government and all political parties should sit down around a table and define the positions or needs or specializations for these peace missions. The money saved by specializing could enable us to continue our peace missions without taking more from our fellow citizens. On this point, I would like the hon. member to tell me if he could agree with that line of thinking, and I know that he has followed peace missions for a long time. He is not afraid to say the exact opposite of the Prime Minister about maintaining peace missions. He definitely thinks that cannot be questioned. But perhaps to reassure our fellow citizens, could we consider together the possibility of reducing some of our military expenditures through specialization, as a way to keep our peace missions without raising taxes? I ask his opinion on this.