Madam Speaker, I will answer the hon. member for Saanich-Gulf Islands, perhaps with a grin. I do not claim that the minister can be lumped in with the bureaucracy of the Canadian Armed Forces, except on a level of responsibility, because everyone and anyone knows that ministers are responsible for the decisions made in their departments. Regarding this issue, I would like to refer you to the Auditor General's 1992 report, which pointed out several administrative problems and bureaucratic shortcomings in his critique of the national defence administration.
The Auditor General repeated the exercise in November 1994, pointing out several shortcomings in the Canadian army. In this sense, I think that the minister should be held responsible for not having trimmed the bureaucracy enough and fixed the administrative problems at National Defence, and for having missed out on potential savings in his last budget. Instead, he went full tilt in the direction of closing or reducing bases, but nowhere is there any evidence that he really intends to address the problems within the administration, which employs approximately 70,000 military staff with 30,000 civilian support staff to back them up at the Department of National Defence.
When I see a member of the armed forces getting paid more to do the same job as a civilian, I wonder about the administration, or, rather, its efficiency. That is why I was saying that there are many problems with the administration of the Canadian Armed Forces and they are brought up very rarely. Very often, we hear members of the government say that all is well in the army, that there is no problem and they never criticize the army.
In closing, I would just like to quote an English newspaper article on the armed forces, which was run about four or five months ago. The journalist said that "armed forces know no master".