Madam Speaker, I want to go back to the member's general point about his perception that there is a lack of foreign policy and so on. I would suggest to the hon. member that if he looked back to the defence white paper of 1964, he would see that nothing much has actually changed. In that paper and in papers ever since then the overall defence policies of Canada have been defence of Canada, sovereignty, and international operations, whether in support of Norad, NATO, or the United Nations.
The overall need for the military is virtually the same today as it was then and the missions basically have not changed. What has changed is what we are facing in our missions today versus what we will be facing in our missions 20 or 30 years from now.
Would the member agree that if we do not know what is going to come down the road 20 or 30 years from now, and we certainly do not, it behooves the government to equip our men and women of the Canadian Forces with the best possible equipment to face whatever threat might come down the road?