National Defence Committee on June 17th, 2010

[Peter Braid, Conservative, Kitchener—Waterloo, ON]

Thank you.

In both questions and answers so far this morning we've had references to Canada's national interests. In your mind, what are our national or strategic interests in this context of peace operations?

[MGen Lewis MacKenzie]

Well, in those parts of the world that are critical to us, the Middle East being one of them, it is increased stability. And obviously, not close behind, but running side by side, is non-proliferation, dealing with the nuclear threat and the potential spread. I'm not terribly concerned with terrorists coming up with a nuclear weapon, other than maybe a dirty bomb, but I am concerned about countries whose objective is to perhaps annihilate the rest of us and get a first-class ticket to heaven. That bothers me a little bit.

[Peter Braid, Conservative, Kitchener—Waterloo, ON]

General, your concerns, your reservations, with respect to the UN, are well-known. Today you've expressed some reservations about NATO as well. I'm just wondering what multilateral institution we turn to, then, to help. Even if peace operations are subcontracted, someone needs to coordinate and subcontract. So what multilateral organization is most capable of acting as a coordinator and a subcontractor? How does the process work?

[MGen Lewis MacKenzie]

The potential is there that in following the wash-up in NATO, two things will happen. Either NATO will survive and have to change...

One of the Canadian recommendations is the simple introduction and implementation of a Canadian recommendation that unanimity can exist in Brussels at the very highest political level, unanimity deciding where we're going to go, what we're going to do. Then once you drop down below Brussels and you get into the field, the people who are carrying the majority of the weight make the decisions. It's just that simple change that would overhaul NATO's chain of command dramatically and make it much more efficient. It's simple to say but difficult to implement.

You can't have in Kandahar province a debate going on as to whether everybody there agrees with what the commander wants to do.

So that's one of the options: that NATO will actually pay attention to a lot of national input like ours, and in particular to the Madeleine Albright study that's taking a look at the restructuring of NATO, and will reform itself and hopefully stop expanding.

After the debacle in Georgia, can you imagine anybody trusting that NATO's going to come to their rescue, including Canada? They couldn't even get there. While they were fighting a relatively minor insurgency in Afghanistan, we were facing the Soviets coming into a country that could have been a NATO country and we were all going to go to attack Russia because of that? I mean, give me a break.

Or it fails. It disintegrates as a result of the European Union coming closer together and coming up with some force. But boy, do they have their problems, too. Germany, France, and the U.K. don't necessarily agree on how that should work. If that fails, then you'll recognize these names: the idea of a standing coalition of the willing—the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand—and funnily enough, a number of the new free satellite countries from the old Soviet Union that have really been pulling their weight in Afghanistan. So I can see something like that happening.

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

Thank you very much.

I will give the floor to Mr. Bachand.

Mr. Bachand, you have five minutes.

[Claude Bachand, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. MacKenzie you seem to think that a coalition of the willing would facilitate operations, somewhat like in the case of the Americans in Iraq.

Do you agree with the fact that international legitimacy can currently only come from the UN? If a coalition of the willing does not have the UN's endorsement, or stamp of approval, even if we do realize that the UN is somewhat out of step, are we still not running the risk of the coalition being rejected by international opinion?

[MGen Lewis MacKenzie]

I don't want to be flippant, but it doesn't matter. NATO decided, and I certainly didn't agree with it, to bomb a sovereign nation, Serbia-Kosovo, without United Nations approval. They went back and checked a resolution that had the air defending the European community military monitors there, and said that was the justification, which it wasn't. Just about every lawyer who looked at it said that wasn't the case. There was no outcry. There should have been an outcry—I was part of it—but there wasn't.

I don't think it matters much. The major powers of the world will decide what they're going to do. If they can get a UN resolution, as George Bush Sr. did for the first Iraq war, then good on them, but they would have done it anyway. They would have gone in anyway.

[Claude Bachand, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

So then, should we be calling into question the UN's usefulness? Do you share Mr. Hillier's opinion that the UN is a decaying body?

[MGen Lewis MacKenzie]

The ironic thing about the UN is that everything that's been added on since 1945--the UNHCR, UNICEF, WHO, the World Health Organization...although you will recall Mayor Lastman in Toronto didn't know WHO. Who are those WHO people about the SARS crisis?

Anyway, all that to say they are brilliant. Sure, the human rights folks have some problems when Libya is the chair and such things, but overall those add-ons... God knows I've worked with UNICEF and UNHCR a lot; they're great and they do a lot of good work. It's the raison d'être for the UN, which was to save us from the scourge of a third world war, and they did, I guess. We didn't have one, thank God.

During the Cold War their capability to cope with situations in Cyprus and the Middle East, which were relatively benign, was perfectly okay. It's the post-Cold War period where we have factions around the world, internal factions, fighting away at each other.

Michael Ignatieff probably explains it better than anybody in his book Blood and Belonging. Once we removed the glue that held the two groups together--the Soviet Union and NATO, led by the U.S.--once that disappeared with the disappearance of the Soviet Union, all these ethnic, religious, territorial, and historic tensions just exploded. In Yugoslavia it was worse than anywhere else because it was both ethnicity and religion.

So the UN serves a very useful purpose. It's got serious problems when it comes to the security responsibilities it has, and that's because it's hamstrung by the permanent five. You probably know the ambassadors from Japan, India, and Brazil, three folks who I think have strong qualifications for permanent membership, went around the world for a year seeking support for them to become permanent members. The report, which was issued about a year and a half ago, said they found the challenge to be problematic but they promised to revisit the issue in 15 years. I've never heard of anything like that in my life--in 15 years.

Those permanent five have it locked up solid, because not only do they have the veto for security issues, it's a little-known fact that they have the veto for procedure within the Security Council, which means the membership. It just takes one of them to veto a new member, and they do every time.

[Claude Bachand, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

This brings us to the issue of UN reform. The fact that a single country with permanent Security Council member status can exercise its right of veto and bring the process to a complete standstill seems like a matter that the UN should look into.

Do you think that it would be possible to reform the UN?

[MGen Lewis MacKenzie]

The Canadian-UN association made recommendations including that five or six years ago. It's well known. Any number of other nations have made similar recommendations, and you're absolutely right, it should reform, but the brick wall is the permanent five. That's the problem.

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

Thank you very much, General.

We'll give the floor to Mr. Boughen for five minutes.

[Ray Boughen, Conservative, Palliser, SK]

Thank you, Chair. I'll share the time with my colleague, Mr. Payne.

Let me add my voice of welcome, General, it's good of you to spend part of your day with us and share your thoughts. I enjoyed your frankness in your early comments.

You mentioned the numbers of troops we need, and we're short. What do you see as the number in the air force, army, and navy? Combined with that question, what do you see as the equipment requirement? You mentioned we were short of equipment. How would you see us acquiring the enlistment of troops...and the equipment question?

[MGen Lewis MacKenzie]

I had to be a realist. When I took an early retirement a couple of years earlier, in 1993, we were around 85,000. We then had the famous decade of darkness in which we started buying people out.

In my perfect world, we'd probably be somewhere around 100,000--but I'll live with 85,000--and then the army would go to units that would be large enough to deploy with very modest augmentation. Our navy has a reputation way beyond its resources, because it's able to command and control foreign ships. And foreign militaries, including the U.S., trust it. So we have experienced commanders there. Our air force has a reputation for outstanding skills, and now we're in the position of having to cut back on flying hours and we are grounding aircraft, etc.

I guess, probably, my timing must have been brilliant, because I would say go back to the way things were when I left and what we were doing then with the numbers we had. We had a large component of air force and army in Europe, and those numbers were supposed to come back to us, and somewhere halfway over the Atlantic they vaporized, and all of a sudden--boom--we lost those positions, and the downgrading of the numbers in the military started.

I also know that all of you would want to have something in your backyard that the military needs, but the fact is it takes so long--like 10 years--in Canada to get from the blueprint to either driving it or flying or sailing it, and what the military needs is something off the shelf. Somehow we get compensation here in Canada for that, but we have to buy stuff off the shelf, which we showed we could do in Afghanistan with artillery pieces and vehicles, etc. We saw the need, and, bang, it was filled. If we had to turn to Canada to replace those, they'd be arriving 10 years from now.

So Public Works and DND have a real challenge. And I know there have been tons of studies, but if I could speed up the procurement issue with a magic wand, that would be one of my top priorities.

[Ray Boughen, Conservative, Palliser, SK]

Okay.

Thanks, Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

Mr. Payne.

[LaVar Payne, Conservative, Medicine Hat, AB]

How much time do I have?

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

You have two minutes.

[LaVar Payne, Conservative, Medicine Hat, AB]

Okay.

Thank you, General, for coming. It was nice to chat with you earlier on. Thank you again for your service to our country. It's an important role, I think, that a lot of people here are grateful for.

My colleagues asked some of the questions, but I would like to do a follow-up.

You did talk about the total number of full-time individuals in the Canadian Forces. What about reserves?

[MGen Lewis MacKenzie]

The reserves will always be picked on when there's a shortage of money. They've been picked on for all of their existence pretty well. “Screwed around” might even be a better description. It just happened recently that, just to be dramatic about it, one busload of reservists going off to a course got a cellphone call saying they were to turn around and come home. The course was cancelled, just because there were inadequate funds to run that particular course.

In spite of all that, they continue to endure, and they are at a peak now in their operational capability. They have a large number of volunteers who fill very important positions. I had the pleasure of meeting with 30 reservists, all from Ontario infantry units, on one of my visits to Afghanistan, who are the convoy escort platoon. As you can imagine, that's the most dangerous job there. I asked for a show of hands for how many of them had been subjected to an IED attack. All the hands went up. What about two attacks? Most of the hands went up. What about three? Half the hands went up. When I got to seven, one hand went up, and the guy had burns to the side of his face. He had all his kit on. He was the one who had nailed a suicide bomber two days earlier, and the fireball had gone over the vehicle and burned his face. I asked him how many of these escorts he had done. He said, “Thirty-eight, sir, but if you wait about five minutes, it'll be thirty-nine.” They're just outstanding soldiers.

So their capability is great, but they're still not supported anywhere near enough with funding. By that I mean they need the actual vehicles they'll see when they go overseas. They need the weapons and all of the kit. But God bless them.

We're probably the only nation in the world that has a regular force larger than its reserve force.

[LaVar Payne, Conservative, Medicine Hat, AB]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

Thank you very much.

I will now give the floor to Mr. Martin.

[Keith Martin, Liberal, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Merci beaucoup, monsieur le président.

Thank you, General MacKenzie, for being here today, and for your ongoing support of your comrades in arms. We greatly appreciate you taking the time.

Sir, we've asked this question a number of times. What do you do in a situation like the DRC, where there's a mass humanitarian disaster? What would you propose in order to prevent that from happening? And in the context of what happened in Sierra Leone, when the Brits marched in there with 830 soldiers, when would that be an appropriate thing to do, by whom, and under what conditions?

Thank you.

[MGen Lewis MacKenzie]

Yes, the Congo is just... The trouble is that all those factions I mentioned, and nations, are fighting over something that's just below the surface of the earth: natural resources. That's the problem.

The solution for the international community to provide some level of security is that you're going to have to have some internal boundaries within the country and have people in an area where you can protect them if it's that bad. The trouble is that the UN would never do that, because it would have to fight its way in. There are so many areas where the diamonds and the gold and all the resources are that you'd end up going in there and being one of the other factions. There's no way, in a country the size of Quebec or Ontario or Europe, the UN could ever generate that number of troops.

It was different in Darfur. You and I communicated on this. With the situation in Darfur, I didn't see us going in and defeating the Khartoum government, but I did see us going in and protecting the women and children in the refugee camps and booting out the terror...or whoever they were; the ones who were the bad guys.

Also, in Chad, where not displaced persons but refugees were provided protection, that's something the UN could do.

[Keith Martin, Liberal, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Perhaps I can ask a question on Canada's role in terms of utilizing regional or subregional forces. We still have ECOWAS, and the EU. Do you see that Canada could take a role in that?

You brought up an interesting point on the disconnect--which, I would argue, is in Afghanistan and many other places--between the military plan and often the runtish political plan that tends to be a laggard and come up behind, often inadequate and late.