Mr. Speaker, I will be cautious in how I say this, but the relevant point is very simple. We need helicopters for search and rescue. I understand as much as anyone in the House that the helicopters are on order. We need helicopters for our military personnel. We need first class equipment because we have first class pilots, men and women who operate the machines and who service them.
To suggest that on the high seas, on the east or west coast of Canada or in the high arctic, human lives are not important is a scandalous admission by the government, but it does not surprise me at all. It is typical of what we have been hearing during the debate and what we have seen from the opposition.
I quoted a lot of numbers previously and, quite frankly, we get lost in the numbers. I will make a comment to the intervention here again. We are not talking about numbers here, we are talking about human lives. We are talking about how we can carry out an offshore rescue, how we can find hunters who are lost, how we can get people out of the high arctic and how we can medivac people in dangerous circumstances.
Only a few minutes ago a member spoke about the fact that we just had a major tremor on the west coast of Canada.
The government is lucky, that is all, that the tremor was 46 miles underground instead of 16 or 17 miles underground. We would not only have highways shut down in B.C., we would have buildings collapse and we would have major fiascos. In order to respond to that, we absolutely have to have the military up to strength and we have to have rescue vehicles. Helicopters are the only rescue vehicle that can be used in those circumstances.