Mr. Chair, I would like to thank my hon. friend for all of his work on Ukraine, for the multiple election missions we put on, for the multiple times he has personally delivered non-lethal military aid to Ukraine. I thank him for all of that on behalf of Canada and on behalf of the Ukrainian people.
An army needs to constantly train. Canada has learned that, even throughout the years of Afghanistan. Every time we sent a new mission to Afghanistan, there was an 18-month cycle of training, deployment and returning. Sometimes they went as long as two years.
The fundamentals of any army have to be reinforced no matter how good it is. It is like an athlete, it needs to continue to train and reinforce those fundamentals. It becomes muscle memory. It becomes instinct. That is what the Ukrainian forces need from us. We have that expertise. We have expertise from the many years in Afghanistan and other missions, Bosnia and what we are learning across the globe right now as Canada works very hard to achieve peace and stability in other places.
The Ukrainian forces need that reinforcement. I know their people are battle-hardened, however, they need to understand the fundamentals of training, they need to be able to train themselves eventually. As a former trainer on many courses myself, it is important that all of this is reinforced and that we provide the fundamentals to the Ukrainian armed forces so that they can carry on forward themselves in future years, keeping their army strong and well-trained.