Mr. Speaker, I thank the opposition critic for defence. I look forward to working with him in the coming years on defence issues to give our armed forces the tools they need.
Our biggest problem with the motion, quite frankly, is not the body of the motion but the preamble. We cannot agree with the preamble. The truth of the matter is that we are doing a great deal to support our military, including the integrated review we have right now on defence, diplomacy, development and trade. They are critically important if we are going to deal with the very complex issues of security that we have today. We know they have changed since 1994. That is why this is taking place.
Second, we have the defence review that is taking place in the department. It will be released to the committee that the hon. member sits on. We look forward to his expert testimony as to how we could make that review better so it will serve our men and women in uniform.
We are increasing our regular forces by 5,000. He knows the restrictions that we have right now. Perhaps he could provide the House with some constructive solutions as to how we could rapidly get the 5,000 troops that we need into the sharp edge of the military. What would he do to enable them? The bottleneck is that we can only get so many people into the system at a certain time. How would he propose we do that? In what time period does he think we could most rapidly do that, and how would he accomplish that goal?