Mr. Speaker, I do not agree that we should be downsizing. I have studied historically as we moved from 100,000 down to 80,000 and down to 60,000. The reality is that even though we are at 60,000 at this point, realistically we never have more than somewhere in the high 40,000 personnel available because of imminent retirements, people off ill, seconded to other duties or any number of other reasons. I recognize that and I do not see us downsizing. I want to take a position on that policy that I am talking about. I do not see us downsizing.
In fact I very much see us spending additional money. Part of the policy that I and I believe our party would like to see is spending more so that when someone like Commander Dallaire is in the field, we would be a position to lead and to commit an additional 2,000 or 5,000 troops and be able to ask Australia, the U.S. and other countries to put 25,000 to 30,000 personnel in the field in Rwanda and stop the killings. We were not able do that.
It was interesting to listen to the Prime Minister recently talking about whether we were going to make some commitments to Iraq. He said no, obviously, but the reality is that we cannot make that commitment. If the world comes to its senses and actually deals with this properly, we will not be in a position to help them.
I very much believe that we have to hold our numbers and in fact probably increase them, but not so much that we are doing the high tech stuff. I have real problems with that. It is not the security problems that I see we are faced with.
On the other hand, as the member knows, we have faced problems at our borders. He also knows the historical problems of foreign trawlers. We need to secure our fishery on both coasts and we need military personnel to provide that to us.