National Defence Committee on April 15th, 2008

[David Mulroney]

They'll be here before February 2009, and that will be a longer-term deployment.

[Dawn Black, NDP, New Westminster—Coquitlam, BC]

And the marines will be gone.

[David Mulroney]

That's what we've been told.

[Dawn Black, NDP, New Westminster—Coquitlam, BC]

You also said that links have been strengthened at this NATO summit between the UN and NATO, that there would be more collaboration, more working together. Could you be more specific about that and tell us in what way, specifically?

Will the new UN Peacebuilding initiative be involved in that too, as the newest organization within NATO, headed by a Canadian woman?

[David Mulroney]

I think the most obvious example of that is the fact that you had the UN Secretary General at the NATO summit, which I think is a first.

Also, part of the NATO plan going forward calls for increased collaboration with the UN family on the ground in Afghanistan. That seems like a natural thing that should have been happening before, but it wasn't built into NATO's plan, and there was no ability at the level of the NATO structure in Brussels to monitor progress. So NATO is undertaking to work closely and to do their planning.

That means that when NATO sits down and thinks about what it's going to do under the heading of reconstruction and development in the south through the provincial reconstruction teams, the PRTs, it's going to take into account the work that the UN, through UNAMA, the special UN program in Afghanistan, is also undertaking. We're seeing at RC South that those meetings are beginning to take place, and that's really important.

Canada plays a key role in that. I spoke to a former UN special representative in Afghanistan who is now retired, and he was saying that one of the things he found very helpful was when countries like Canada really illustrated ...on the ground in Kabul by meeting and attending to and supporting him. The fact that serious countries like Canada supported him actually enabled him to make progress in Afghanistan and to have a degree of credibility.

We're working very closely with Kai Eide, the UN representative, to be sure that it's clear to everyone on the ground that he's someone Canada supports. We value his work, and we want to see him succeed. We're looking to make the connections ourselves and to help make the connections between the UN and NATO.

[Dawn Black, NDP, New Westminster—Coquitlam, BC]

One of the issues that have certainly been on the agenda here and in the other NATO countries too, I believe, is the issue of detainees and transfer to Afghan authorities. I wanted to ask you if that was on the table in the NATO discussions. What came out of that? Obviously it's a joint problem for all of the NATO countries. Were any joint solutions discussed, and if so, what were they?

[David Mulroney]

There was no discussion that I was aware of at Bucharest on the subject of detainees. We certainly report into NATO and ISAF about what we're doing and how we do things, and we're aware of what our partners are doing. I can say that even when we've met informally with our partners, and particularly our partners in the south, when we have described the range of things that Canada does in terms of building capacity in Afghanistan, in terms of training the people who work in the detention system in Afghanistan, in terms of investment in physical structures in Afghanistan, we are significantly in the lead.

So I think Canada plays a fairly important role in ensuring best practices, because we have the most developed doctrine of working with the national directorate of security, the primary ones that detainees get handed over to.

[Dawn Black, NDP, New Westminster—Coquitlam, BC]

I wanted you to elaborate a bit on your task force and how it relates to the cabinet committee that is chaired by David Emerson. Do you meet with the cabinet committee as well to share your information with that committee?

[David Mulroney]

This task force was created as a result of the government's response to the Manley panel. I was previously doing a coordinating role from Foreign Affairs. I think the recommendation of the panel was that as important as that coordinating role was in a department, it would be easier to do it in the Privy Council Office--and that is, I think, a fact.

So the government's response created a cabinet committee, chaired by Minister Emerson and including Minister Day, Minister Bernier, Minister Oda, and Minister MacKay. It also created this new task force.

I'm a secretary to the cabinet committee. The cabinet committee sets out a work program, and we ensure that we're meeting it. The work program, as Minister Emerson mentioned in his technical brief the other day, largely follows the Manley panel.

So it's all about ensuring that we have very clear and very limited Canadian government priorities for Afghanistan. We're not trying to do everything. We're trying to do the very most important things to transform a place like Kandahar. We ensure that our programming is aligned with those priorities, and, most importantly that we have benchmarks we're willing to be held to, which are clear, measurable objectives that we report to Canadians on. We're putting that work program in place right now.

A lot of the work has been done in various places, but it needs to be put in a coherent way and really focused on our 2011 timeline for Kandahar.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Thanks, Ms. Black.

Mr. Hawn.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, Mr. Mulroney, for being here.

I'd like to carry on with the roles that DFAIT and other organizations can play in the future. There has been criticism, obviously, of DFAIT and CIDA not getting out and about with the CF, staying back in KAF and so on.

How do you see that role evolving now with DFAIT and the CF and the new Canadian representative there and the ambassador? How do you see all that moving ahead? And can you give some specifics about how you see that evolving?

[David Mulroney]

Over the course of the last year, we've basically doubled the number of civilians we have in Afghanistan, doubled the size of the embassy, and doubled the number of people we have in Kandahar. In Kandahar we have some folks who work at the Kandahar Airfield, but we have even more who work with the provincial reconstruction team.

We've also created a new position, the representative of Canada in Kandahar, who is the senior Canadian, the boss of all the civilians on the ground, and who represents the ambassador. Their job is to make sure that everybody is focused on the same set of objectives.

So that's been a big change. But I think the Manley panel was telling us, “That's okay, but you have to step it up to the next level and you have to do even more.” So what we're working on now, in addition to the policy work and ensuring that we're all clear in terms of core priorities, is to be sure that we've got the people on the ground to operationalize that. We're working with the departments right now to look at the next level of deployments of civilians to Afghanistan. That's going to mean more people on the civilian side and more senior people.

We then have to work through some issues with the Canadian Forces: how do we enable them to do their work safely and securely in Kandahar? I know we're going to find solutions to that, but that's a challenge we're working through right now.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Now, do you have any idea of the numbers of civilians you're talking about? Up to this point, of course, the workforce, per se, has been mostly military. You know, people throw out $1 in $10, but a big chunk of that $10 for the military has been in fact development work, and military people doing that work.

What kind of numbers of those extra civilians are we talking about?

[David Mulroney]

Right now we have roughly 25 civilians down in Kandahar, at the PRT. It will grow to 30, and I think over time we're aiming to double that, over the course of the next year.

If you look at deployments to PRTs, although it's not as many, obviously, as the Canadian Forces--there isn't a need for real parity there--we're doing quite well in terms of the size of our civilian deployment at the PRT, but we think we can take that, as I say, to the next level.

The other thing that was certainly present in the Manley report, and it's in the thinking of a lot of our like-minded, is to move to greater civilian oversight and leadership of the actual development programs on the ground. That's going to take, as I say, getting more senior people out into the field.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

I'd just like to talk about benchmarks for a minute. Obviously, the more specific the benchmark and the more fluid the environment, the more difficult it is to stick to that. What are the sort of benefits and risks of specifics, and sort of the limits of significance that we should attribute to meeting, falling short, or exceeding those kind of benchmarks in what's obviously a very fluid environment?

[David Mulroney]

That's one of the biggest challenges we face right now, to get those right so that they're meaningful, they're ambitious, and they stretch us in terms of what we're trying to achieve, but that they're also realistic.

Minister Emerson spoke the other night at the technical briefing about having a realistic estimate of what Kandahar in, say, 2011 is going to look like.

I first visited Afghanistan in 1976, well before I joined government. That was just at the end of that kind of golden period when Afghanistan was at peace. It was a peaceful country; I was able to drive from Kabul to Kandahar to Herat. But there were still lots of parts of Afghanistan that weren't safe to go to. Corruption, I think, was still a problem. There were still a lot of the issues that you find in any developing country.

I think that's something we need to get our minds around: for a long, long time, Afghanistan will be a developing country and will have some of the problems associated with it.

We're aiming to move Afghanistan to a state in its transition where Afghans, while the country may still have some of those same problems, are capable of managing it themselves. They're increasingly capable of providing their own security; they're increasingly capable of dealing with issues of corruption, which will probably continue, but they'll have the means of dealing with it that they don't have now.

So it's really about moving Afghanistan along a continuum. The end state of developed status, if we look at any of the countries in the developing world, can be a long time coming, but there comes a time when the government itself has the ability to meet some of those challenges.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

What's our biggest challenge or biggest risk of failure over the next three years?

[David Mulroney]

I think we have to be frank about the security situation in southern Afghanistan. It has changed over time. In 2006, at the time of Operation Medusa, you had set-piece fights with the Taliban; that has changed to a more asymmetric form of attack, which is quite insidious. Its whole effort is to undermine civilian confidence, to make NGOs wary of doing work there, to really strike at what we're trying to do.

We have a challenge in terms of meeting that. I think the Canadian Forces is coming up with some very effective means of addressing it, but it's a challenge that remains. I think that is probably the number one issue, trying to address that security situation so that we can work effectively and deliver what we need to deliver to people in southern Afghanistan.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

So basic physical security is still the key to success.

[David Mulroney]

It's still a major key to success, yes.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Thank you.

Thank you, sir. We appreciate your being here. We appreciate Mr. Cannis's bringing this issue forward and giving us this opportunity to hear from you.

Just before you go, one issue that was raised by the Manley panel was having a signature Canadian project. Is there any advancement on that? Are you free to comment?

[David Mulroney]

I was a secretary to the Manley panel, so I had a chance to travel with them. The argument that CIDA has traditionally put forward is that they're working on long-term development and long-term capacity-building in Afghanistan. The panel basically said we get that and understand that it's important, but it's also important that Afghans feel immediate relief and sense that the international community is having an impact. In places like Kandahar, they need to see benefits now. They can't wait three or four or five years. That was really at the heart of what the Manley panel was talking about. They felt that we needed to do something that would have that degree of direct impact on Afghans.

We're now looking at where we're spending our programming money, and that's an issue before us right now. We are determined that the review will include reference to a project or projects that are more definably Canadian and that have some resonance in Kandahar. So that's an issue. It hasn't been discussed by ministries yet, but that's very much on the agenda.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Good. I hope we have some opportunity for input on one of those.

Again, thank you, sir. We appreciate your time here.

We'll suspend for a short time while we set up our next panel.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

We'll reconvene and move on to our next order of business. We continue our study on the health services provided to Canadian Forces personnel.

Today we have four witnesses before us. From Military Family Services, we have Celine Thompson, director. From Military Family Resource Centre, Halifax and Region, we have Colleen Calvert. Colleen says that spring has sprung in Halifax, finally. From Gagetown Military Family Resource Centre, we have Beth Corey. And from Petawawa Military Family Resource Centre, we have Theresa Sabourin.

I understand that you all have short presentations to make.

Celine, are we going to start with you and work our way across? Go ahead.

[Celine Thompson, Director, Military Family Services]

Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon.

It's an honour for me to be here to speak about the military family services program.

As mentioned, my name is Celine Thompson. I am the director of Military Family Services. It's the responsibility of my office to manage this national program on behalf of the chief military personnel and on behalf of this department. These responsibilities include central funding, policy development, monitoring, evaluation, technical guidance, etc. In short, I am the bureaucrat.

Conversely, the three women with me have the privilege and indeed the challenge of trying to deliver this program to the local communities they serve. Unlike me, they are not here as departmental representatives, but rather as the senior staff person of their respective military family resource centres, accountable to their communities and employed by their community-based boards of directors. These boards of directors are nominated and elected by the communities served and are, by mandate, always led by a majority representation of civilian spouses of Canadian Forces members.

The structure and governance of the military family services program is probably best understood in its historical context. Prior to the establishment of the program in 1991, we were made aware, through research, that family support within the Canadian Forces, when in fact it did exist, was at best ad hoc, piecemeal, and largely ineffective. In addition, we discovered through the documented voices of spouses of Canadian Forces members that they felt they didn't have influence, never mind leadership, over the programs and services that so impacted their lives. The same research revealed that there were pervasive concerns with families that issues presented to the chain of command would not be held in confidence and would indeed negatively impact the CF members' careers.

The current structure of the military family services program largely addresses those historic systemic concerns. The military family resource centres are third-party organizations, working at arm's length from the department. Civilian spouses have legitimate voice in their operation and governance, and they guide the local response to local priorities. Information secured by military family resource centres is held in confidence and protected by the program's own privacy code.

The military family resource centres are the most visible demonstration of the department's support for families. Established at virtually every location where we have families in significant numbers, these provincially incorporated, non-profit organizations work under the leadership of the communities they serve, but they work in close collaboration locally with their base commanders and nationally with the staff of my office.

The program has grown substantially since 1991. Our last full review of the program was in 2002-03. At that time we developed, in consultation with our stakeholders, a refined set of deliverables for the MFRCs to achieve based on the unique stresses associated with the Canadian Forces lifestyle. We formally recognized that families' health and well-being were critical to the operational effectiveness of the Canadian Forces, and we reaffirmed our commitment to continuing to work with the families to ensure that their needs guided our actions and our priorities.

Five years on and we are again in the throes of transformation. Our environment has changed substantially within these past few years. The operational tempo and the demand that places on communities and families can't be understated. Critical to your deliberations is our realization that when a Canadian Forces member is injured or ill, it is the family that is often the primary caregiver, irrespective of what resources the department may provide. We also know that our current operational demands are not without impact on the families themselves. We have an obligation to bolster their inherent strength and their inherent resilience, and to see this through.

The chief of military personnel, on behalf of the CDS, has tasked us with significantly enhancing our range of programs that we provide to the families of Canadian Forces members. His intent is that we will do so by building on the strengths of the military family resource centres. As we are just about to embark on this task, your conversations with us today are timely and will no doubt move the process forward.

Thank you. I'll conclude my comments now.