National Defence committee  It wouldn't take any longer than 12 hours, depending on where we're going. It could be eight hours or less.

National Defence committee  The replacement isn't my portfolio. I will limit my comment to the fact that we have the Hercules and the Buffalo that need to be replaced. The aircraft are very old and very expensive to maintain. What they do serves our requirements, so we're looking to replace them. I can't comment on the actual specifications and performance.

National Defence committee  Small map, big picture, I guess. We do a tremendous number of medical evacuations, and those are in there too. Some of it is urban, some of it is a little bit offshore. It's the way it's depicted there, sir.

National Defence committee  We actually have a very good working relationship with our northern neighbours, both Russia and the U.S. Our control centres and their control centres are in daily communication. Often we will use one of our SAR resources on the Great Lakes and in the Michigan area, areas in their territory.

National Defence committee  Absolutely. That's complete crews. It's just a function of how long a shift it is until you're time-expired and then have to do rests. There's leave and all those sorts of things. So it's not a matter of moving one aircraft to a location. Even seasonally, it becomes very difficult to come up with that.

National Defence committee  That is correct. In fact, we do an international exercise called Arctic SAREX with Russia and the United States Alaskan Command. In the last one we did, we actually used MAJAID as the centrepiece, because they sort of identify this capability as unique and not unwanted. It's just that their structures are different from ours and they don't have it.

National Defence committee  It's absolutely fair. I think it's part of our responsibility to provide the monitoring operational necessity. My mandate is to deliver a SAR service. It's our organization that determines there's a requirement to ship the resources or indeed to get additional resources. It's our obligation to present that to the leadership and take it from there.

National Defence committee  The statistics that we showed you are basically from our database, but it's the rescue coordinating centres that tabulate those. They are tasked with that. Each incident generates a SAR report, and it's all captured in there. As I mentioned earlier in our briefing, sometimes it is the territorial RCMP's responsibility to go out and look for the lost hunter.

National Defence committee  And as I mentioned, it's the only capability of any nation in the world that I'm aware of.

National Defence committee  Absolutely, sir.

National Defence committee  The kits can accommodate shelter and things for 320, plus all the kit that I could provide in three Hercules, a wide-body.

National Defence committee  Thank you for the offer. Actually, the whole privatization of SAR has been looked at before—some portions of it, all of it, none of it—and the way it's established right now, with the network of players, the coordination centres, the dedicated units, I would speculate that the private corporations could replicate some, if not all of it, but I think it would be prohibitively costly to do it that way.

National Defence committee  There are two approaches to that. If we were to add additional resources, that wouldn't have much impact on the south, but it would have a significant impact on the costs associated with SAR. It's not inexpensive to establish a 24 and 7 operation given the training requirement and the crewing requirement.

National Defence committee  That's a reasonable question. First of all, establishing any 24 and 7 operation requires 5.5 or 6 crew and several aircraft, because you have to do recurrent training.

National Defence committee  I would absolutely give you a report. I can't say, because I don't have the numbers here, what those numbers would be, but if you're asking whether we can provide--