Madam Speaker, that is a very good question. I thought I did address it although I am not used to having to speak in 10-minute periods. Perhaps I did not have the time to enunciate it.
More and more we discharge our obligations whether it be peacekeeping or whether in aid to the civil power, domestic crises such as the ones we saw this year. We helped in the search for a young Saskatchewan girl. We helped with the forest fires in B.C. We helped last winter with the floods in Quebec. We are going to have to turn more and more to reservists, those men and
women who train part time, on the weekends, the unsung heroes of the Canadian military tradition.
It costs money and to continue to do this we have to reorder our priorities, reshape our budgetary priorities.
I want to assure the hon. member that we will not be so stretched that we will not be able to discharge those very emergencies of which he speaks. That is why I have raised the subject of our future continued engagement in Bosnia and Croatia. We are getting not to the breaking point but to the stretching point. If we are to continue the multiplicity of peacekeeping engagements, and they have been coming fast and furious, we are now talking about the possibilities of Haiti and we have been in Rwanda, which was unforeseen certainly when I became minister, obviously we are going to have to redirect more and more of our budget to this. This could mean that we will have to take it from other very deserving components of the military budget.
I want to assure the member that when we have disasters such as the ones of which he spoke a little earlier we will be there. We will not let the Canadian people down.