Mr. Speaker, the member makes a good point, because our military people are the best trained people in the world. My son went with a crew from his squadron years ago to an international airlift rodeo in North Carolina, and our crew was one of the best in the world in spite of the fact that they went there with a 20 year old aircraft when countries like Israel and the United States flew in with brand new aircraft. Our people represented us proudly. They did great.
When the government finally does get around to providing them with new, state of the art equipment, instead of giving these highly trained service people the responsibility of maintaining and being proud of the aircraft, for political reasons the government hires civilian contractors to do the maintenance on this equipment.
Members have no idea how demoralizing that is to someone who has made a career of learning how to maintain this equipment and becoming the best in the world at maintaining it for Canada and for the Canadian armed forces. Clearly this government does not even think about that. Its first consideration is political, it is spinning, it is providing smoke and mirrors to cover up what it is doing. The government is making promises that it has no intention of fulfilling and I think that is tragic for those people.