National Defence Committee on Nov. 29th, 2011

[Rick Norlock, Conservative, Northumberland—Quinte West, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you very much, General, for coming today.

My questions will centre around the Canada Command component. As we're looking at the global readiness of the Canadian armed forces and how it's measured against the Canadian armed forces' ability to carry out six core missions simultaneously, using this as a measure of readiness, would you say that Canada Command is ready as a force employer?

[LGen Walter Semianiw]

In short, Canada Command is ready as a force employer. If you look at the last year in particular, it was the first time that each of our regional joint task force commanders was involved in a domestic operation. This is probably the highest tempo we've seen. And in all of those cases, Canada Command, the Canadian Forces, the Department of National Defence, and the government provided the capabilities and support needed to be able to address them, as I'm sure you've seen in the news: floods, hurricanes, supporting the Olympics, supporting any other type of activity.

[Rick Norlock, Conservative, Northumberland—Quinte West, ON]

Thank you very much.

In that context, how many Canadian armed forces members or soldiers would be available at any time and specifically on standby to address any domestic or continental emergency?

[LGen Walter Semianiw]

We have a framework that clearly says that for any issues, challenges, threats, or hazards that evolve in Canada, the entire Canadian Forces are available to the Chief of the Defence Staff for any of those issues. It is not just the ready duty ships, the aircraft and personnel that I mentioned. That's the first wave; that's the first piece.

If it were required, the entire Canadian Forces, all its capability, would be mobilized by the Chief of the Defence Staff to address any issues that came up.

[Rick Norlock, Conservative, Northumberland—Quinte West, ON]

Thank you very much.

I always try to ask a question the average person wonders about, such as why doesn't the army just go in and do this, or why doesn't this happen, or how come that doesn't happen.

Would you go through the steps taken when an emergency occurs in a particular area of Canada? What are the steps and what needs to happen before the Canadian armed forces take action? Usually you folks are the last people to be asked when the civilian component is not able to handle the enormity of the situation.

[LGen Walter Semianiw]

If there were a crisis somewhere across Canada, first, at the municipal level, municipal first responders would try to deal with the issue. If they wouldn't or couldn't and can't, then the province or territory would be asked to come in. If a province can't or doesn't have the support it needs—and in some cases, as we saw in the last year, it may not have—it will then come to the federal government. It will come to the Department of Public Safety and the Minister of Public Safety will look at the request.

Throughout that entire period, to be very clear, the Government of Canada, the Department of Public Safety, the Canadian military, and other departments and agencies are already well aware of what's going on at the local level. We have that awareness. We're already starting to do some type of contingency planning of what if we were to be asked for this event. What should we have ready to be deployed?

The Department of Public Safety looks at that request—a request for assistance, in many cases—and is talking very quickly throughout the night with different federal agencies and departments to see how quickly we could bring it together. Then the Minister of Public Safety would come to the Minister of National Defence and ask for that support. Then we would move on and provide that support as requested by the territory or province.

Clearly, the province or territory is in the lead. They ask us to come in, coordinated and integrated by the Department of Public Safety for all federal assets. The key to success here is an integrated approach, not just the military. By having all of the assets together, it leads to much longer-term solutions to the issues.

[Rick Norlock, Conservative, Northumberland—Quinte West, ON]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

You have about 30 seconds.

[Rick Norlock, Conservative, Northumberland—Quinte West, ON]

I was going to lead into this, but I'll go directly to the question.

Regarding the floods in Quebec, there were some decisions made, or decisions not made, with regard to remaining there after the fact and with cleanup. I'd like you to discuss what criteria decide how long the forces will remain at any given site; if you could walk us through that quickly.

[LGen Walter Semianiw]

There is a set of criteria laid down from the federal government and from the Department of Public Safety of when federal assets would be used. For example, one of those is would we be competing with local businesses. Clearly, it's the last thing, I think, Canadians would want, that we're competing with local industry. That's not what it's about. If the capability is on the ground to do it, use it. That's the message that's passed, and that's what we look at when we go into these issues.

When you look at what happened in the Montérégie region, the Canadian Forces were asked by the Province of Quebec to come in to provide assistance. We were in there, I believe, within 12 hours from any location to provide that support, based on the requests and the demands from the province.

One point to note is that there is a new factor that has emerged. When you look at us working, we do work in Quebec now with a new agency that's in Quebec that provides emergency management support. We work for them. It was the agency that, in this case, told us every day what we should be doing and what jobs we needed to do.

It was very different during the ice storm, where we worked directly with cities, towns, and the like. The new construct in place very much mirrors the federal approach, that we work for the emergency management organization in the province of Quebec, which laid out for us exactly what they needed us to do, day by day, until the job was done.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you.

Could I just follow up on that before we go to our next questioner?

We had a similar situation in Manitoba. As the flood event changed—first, it was flooding along the Assiniboine River and the forces were building up the dikes and going into communities sandbagging to protect them from the imminent flood. The same thing occurred along the Souris River in the towns of Souris and Melita—the forces were there.

Along Lake Manitoba, though, as waters slowly rose, there was a call for help. We did have some troops come up, and a lot of sandbagging happening in Winnipeg moved up, but not to the same degree of manpower that we experienced along the Assiniboine and the Souris.

Who made those decisions as to the deployment of the members of the Canadian armed forces for sandbagging operations?

[LGen Walter Semianiw]

That would have come from the province. In the end, the province decides how to use the assets and resources available based on the criteria in place. The commander of joint task force west was in Edmonton, flew to Winnipeg, and worked closely with the province. At that time the province felt they had the ability and capacity to handle that issue as we stayed focused on the Souris. Many may not be aware that we remained on alert for a much longer period after the crisis was gone, with forces ready to go, which was the primary area of effort. The province focused on Lake Manitoba at the time.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

My conversation with the premier was a little bit different from that, but thank you.

Mr. Alexander.

[Chris Alexander, Conservative, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Thanks, Mr. Chair.

It's great to have you with us, General. Our colleague Madame Perreault mentioned your distinguished record. I can't help noting for all of my fellow members of the committee that you are the third witness we've had in uniform from the Canadian Forces who commanded our forces in Afghanistan in one way or another, at one stage or another. The others were General Vance and General Devlin. It's great to be with you again for that reason as well.

With forest fires, floods, avalanches, and--God forbid--earthquakes, obviously it was a very busy year for Canada Command in most of those areas. Three or four provinces were looked at or supported in one way or another.

Predicting the weather is an imperfect art at best, and probably impossible over the long term. But was there any way for you, in conjunction with 36 other agencies and departments that look at this, to predict that 2011 would be a particularly tough year? Was that a surprise to some extent? How does the need to surge into Manitoba, the Assiniboine and Souris areas, and the Richelieu affect readiness for other tasks? Looking ahead, is there any way to predict whether this kind of demand will be greater, lesser, or the same in the years to come?

[LGen Walter Semianiw]

First, there were no predictions about the level of activity we had over the last year, not just here at home but around the world, when you see what is going on with natural disasters and the like. At Canada Command we track the natural disasters that happen around the world. There's a lot going on from a weather, meteorological, and natural disaster point of view. It's something we noted.

However, once we realized that perhaps this was the new normal we didn't understand why, because nobody could tell us why this was happening. In the end we maintained even greater vigilance. We maintained that vigilance throughout that period, not knowing that something was going to happen, but knowing that given there were so many things happening, the likelihood or probability was probably greater. We maintained that vigilance. We actually had discussions at my morning meetings that there were greater levels of activity. We couldn't explain why, but we needed to be more vigilant than we had been in the past, because the trend could be that more was going to happen.

We had land forces in Manitoba at the time that we could deploy very quickly. They could be in the affected area within two hours, which facilitated our support.

Looking into the future, it's difficult to say what's going to happen. However, we have learned from the past that we need to further strengthen our relationships with all of our different partners and have forces ready to go. The last year has proved that by having troops ready to go and being aware of the situation, we can provide the support to Canadians when it's needed. The question is, will this be the future? I don't know, but we are ready to deal with that issue.

It comes back to one of the questions. If we need more, the Canadian Forces will provide more troops. At one point we had almost 2,500 to 3,000 men and women in uniform in the home game supporting issues at home. We got them from where we needed them. Regular and reserve forces came out and organized into groups to do what they had to do.

[Chris Alexander, Conservative, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Drug enforcement is primarily a task for police and law enforcement, but you support it. We know that in parts of Mexico it is a deadly business. Sometimes hundreds and thousands of people are killed every year. One of the tasks of Canada Command, if I understand correctly, is to deter the impact of those networks inside Canada as they try to manufacture things here or move products in and out of the country.

How ready are we for those tests? I know we've sent ships as part of task groups to the Caribbean and elsewhere. I see that you interact with U.S. Southern Command, which I presume is related to a lot of things, but among them the drug threat. How good is our understanding of what is happening in those networks and how the threat to us is likely to evolve?

[LGen Walter Semianiw]

First, we have a very good understanding of what is ongoing and what's happening, driven in large part by the relationships we have across the western hemisphere, and not just with U.S. NORTHCOM and SOUTHCOM, but with different federal departments. The Department of Public Safety is connected to the Department of Homeland Security and across the western hemisphere to different agencies and departments. So we actually know what's going on.

As to acting against the challenge, you touched on our task groups. Actually, it's much deeper than that. It's an ongoing task called Operation Caribe, where we provide ships and surveillance aircraft—and it has been in the newspapers already—to a multinational organization that is fighting the TCOs, transnational criminal organizations, the transnational cartels both in the Caribbean and the Pacific. We do it for about seven or eight months of the year, provide ships and surveillance aircraft to differing degrees. Their task is to interdict any drugs moving up in the maritime environment. It's been extremely successful. Those ships then are packaged together with other nationalities—be it U.K., be it Dutch, be it French—in those regions, to be able to stop and deter any movement of drugs north into North America.

We continue to do that to actually be successful. We have that situational awareness of what's going on, as other federal departments have that awareness with their counterparts.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you. Time has expired.

We have time for a third round.

Mr. Christopherson.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

I didn't know if I'd get a chance to ask this or not. Assuming there is a situation where you have two needs, both pressing, and both involve Canadian citizens' lives being at risk, and you, the armed forces, cannot physically respond to both, somebody has to make a horrible decision. First of all, can you tell me who, ultimately, would make that decision and bear the responsibility? Just as important, what are the critical factors they would go through in making that decision, recognizing that normally there isn't the luxury of a lot of reflective time to call committee meetings and consult when a decision has to be made. General, who does that fall to, and what is the process that person needs to go through to reach that decision?

[LGen Walter Semianiw]

I would draw your attention to the fact that we had that case this spring, when we were fighting floods in two different areas, in both the province of Quebec and the province of Manitoba, and it proved extremely successful.

We've never had to be involved in an either/or discussion, as mentioned here, of providing support either here or providing it there. But again, from a federal response, that is a good question to be posed to the Department of Public Safety. As I stated, requests from the territories and the provinces come to the Department of Public Safety, who then look at it, determine what could be provided, and then come to different federal departments and agencies to determine who will provide what.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

So there is no situation you could imagine where that would happen?

[LGen Walter Semianiw]

I have not seen that situation, having been in this position, and having read all the historical data in the last four or five years. If you look at supporting the Olympics, where we had so many troops there at the same time, and fighting floods and threats back home, we have always had the capability, from a Canadian Forces perspective, to be able to deal with any of the threats and challenges that came.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Okay, thank you.

In terms of readiness, there has been some reference to our allies, particularly our NATO allies, and their review of where they're at vis-à-vis what's going on in the world, and some of the fiscal realities that virtually everyone in the world is facing. In terms of that kind of review—that readiness review, looking into the future—where do we fit in the scheme of that, both in terms of the planning of it, but also in the shaping? What are your thoughts on that, to give us some comparison?

[LGen Walter Semianiw]

It's a question you'd have to pose to other commanders--Commander CEFCOM, because he's the one who deals and works with NATO. I'm more back here in the home game.

What I can add from the perspective of North America is that with both U.S. SOUTHCOM and NORTHCOM, which are the commands south of the border, we are inextricably linked. We talk to each other. The commanders know each other. We have staff talks. What does that mean? Our teams come together twice a year to talk about ongoing issues, challenges, and to talk about the way ahead, and not just where we're at or what we have to do. So we are intimately involved, north and south of the border, with likely challenges and threats that we see we need to be prepared to address.

But from a NATO perspective, I do not get involved in those discussions. You'd have to address those to the Commander of the Canadian Expeditionary Force Command.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Very good. Thank you, General.

Thank you, Chair.