Mr. Speaker, I appreciate that the hon. member feels constrained by this in response to his constituents. I would do the same thing and I appreciate his concern.
I would just like to repeat what the minister said this morning. I have heard him say it many times. That is that we have to be very clear that the infrastructure rationalization is separate from the defence policy.
The hon. member for Saanich-Gulf Islands will remember as I do that whenever cuts and reductions in the military force came up those of us in uniform would reach for a thing called the infrastructure study. We would give it to the politicians because we knew they would never cut back on infrastructure. It was politically dangerous to engage in infrastructure rationalization.
We-not just any side of the House, but all politicians and I am one of them-cannot engage in that any longer. We now have an infrastructure for 75,000 people that we had for 130,000. We may get away with plus or minus 10 or 20 per cent but we cannot get away with 100 per cent deficit. We have one building for every two people in the Canadian forces. We cannot rationalize that. We cannot agree with that and cut the operational edge of the armed forces. It would not be fair to our men and women in uniform.
We have an operational capability right now. That is essentially to send a task group to sea, to send two squadrons of fighter aircraft abroad and to send a battle group. We want to honour the commitments we have made in the red book but at the same time maintain our operational commitment until we decide in a defence policy review what we want that commitment to be.
The hon. member knows I am unable to comment on the question he has asked me. I hope the overall perspective I have given him will put it in the context of what we are discussing today and why the policy review will be in the future and infrastructure decisions will have to be made before that.