Madam Chairman, I am pleased to say, and perhaps the hon. member was not here when I noted this earlier, that we have now regained the position that was our target in our policy, which was 60,000. In fact we are over the 60,000 mark. We are now at 60,484.
I know there are discussions about whether we should go even higher than that. This is part of the considerations that can be made in the context of our defence review update. We are at the target that is part of our current policy. This has helped to provide us with the troops that we need to carry out our missions.
We have a very high percentage of them deployed on overseas operations. We would be one of the highest certainly among the allied countries in that respect.
At the same time, to get to that number, we put in effect a new recruitment program, which helped us to do that. We are changing our incentives and our efforts overall to retain Canadian forces personnel. Our attrition rates are down. That is all part and parcel of why we have been able to get our personnel statistics at a higher level, as we now have them over 60,000.