Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you for the opportunity to address the committee.
Many of today's most pressing security concerns are the result of civil wars and civil unrest within states or regions, which are often compounded by state fragility. By state fragility I mean a state's incapacity or lack of will to maintain a rule of law and to provide core services to its population.
Fragility affects roughly 15% of states—a population of some one billion. The human impact can be terrible. Fragile states are often conduits for transnational organized crime, piracy, terrorism, arms proliferation, and the violent targeting of vulnerable populations. State fragility also costs the international system; the estimates are some $270 billion annually.
When the Government of Canada decides to respond to such insecurity, it draws on a range of tools. The tools that my department contributes include the following: diplomatic engagement through preventative diplomacy and mediation efforts; support for economic sanctions, including export controls; the deployment of civilians and, at times, military experts bilaterally in areas such as elections' monitoring; legal and constitutional reform; policing; borders; corrections; the training of foreign military forces; and, finally, financial and expert support to international peace operations.
Across this spectrum, from soft security to hard security engagements, cooperation with DND is absolutely integral to our efforts. We've learned that responding to conflicts almost always requires a multi-dimensional approach, close civilian and military cooperation.
Let's talk about a vital lesson we learned in Afghanistan. We, the local team, on a personal basis, and Canada, as a government, have learned a lot about integrating civilian and military engagements in fragile states and states in conflict, such as Afghanistan, post-earthquake Haiti and the two Sudans. We also learned about the importance of cohesive and coordinated efforts, especially in the context of Afghanistan, as I just mentioned.
Afghanistan led us to develop shared strategic priorities with very specific parameters for the first time. Through joint planning, leadership, intelligence sharing—in Ottawa as well as in Afghanistan, including the south, in Kandahar—resource allocation and communications, we developed a single, completely integrated strategy. In addition, joint training and pre-deployment exercises increased considerably over the course of Canada's engagement in Kandahar. They helped introduce the key players to each other and bridge institutional cultures.
We have learned many lessons in Afghanistan, and those lessons are ongoing. Our coordinated civilian-military efforts continue to support the development of the Afghan security forces, as Canada is the second-largest contributor to the NATO Training Mission Afghanistan, providing both military and civilian police trainers.
In the case of peace operations, another example is that the engagement of civilian experts alongside defence personnel can make a critical difference. I'll give you some examples. Civilian experts help build host governments' capacity for security, governance, economic development, and the establishment of the rule of law, so they can get at the root causes of the insecurity, but they can also work alongside military to address the impacts of state fragility. We currently deploy Canadian government personnel to eight UN peace operations, with a total, as of February 28, of 42 military, 164 police, and 17 corrections experts. These are just the UN peace operations, and it excludes ISAF, etc.
Foreign Affairs works closely with partners, notably National Defence, RCMP, Corrections, and Justice, and we do that to coordinate deployments in a way that identifies special skills that Canadians bring to the table. It matches those skills with the core functions of the mission. So we're bringing something special, a special interest, a special niche, to the table.
One example is in the Democratic Republic of Congo where Canadian civilian experts work alongside the UN mission to give technical assistance to Congolese military and civilian authorities to investigate and prosecute war crimes and crimes against humanity, including sexual violence.
As one of the top 10 financial contributors to the UN peacekeeping budget, we've got a strong interest in ensuring proper training, coordination, and burden-sharing to make these UN multi-dimensional operations as effective as possible. We do that through a number of modalities, and we can talk about that in the question period. They include financial support of civilian deployments, as I said.
One of the key tools that we use to address fragility is our international security programming. We manage it in Foreign Affairs, but we do it with the rest of government by deploying experts across government, as I said. So we focus on state security and justice sectors, clearing and containing weapons of mass destruction, training police and border guards, and helping support citizens' rights to redress injustice. Those will help prevent conflict, but in a post-conflict environment those are also important tools to stabilize.
Let me give you a couple of examples and I'll finish, Mr. Chair.
The Americas, Haiti, Central America, and Colombia, are top priorities for our engagement on security for a number of reasons. There's a direct impact on Canadian security interests. A lot of the transnational organized crime issues that are in Central America make their way to Canadian borders. It also poses a risk to Canadian economic and security interests in those regions. It's also part of our burden-sharing with Mexico and the U.S., with this important partnership that we need to maintain.
A second example is in the Middle East and North Africa and the transitions in the Arab world over the past year. We've responded through diplomacy and programming, in addition to some of the military interventions in Libya, which we can talk about as well. But as a corollary to that, throughout the region we're supporting a range of weapons of mass destruction threat reduction programming, in Libya, for instance, and chemical weapons destruction.
Finally, let's talk about cooperation in terms of foreign affairs and defence.
As I mentioned in the introduction, our close cooperation with the Department of National Defence is a key element of our department's engagement in security matters, but also of the whole spectrum of security considerations.
In Libya, to get a political consensus amongst 28 allies and to bring military authorities to plan and deploy recent military assets in record time required extremely tight coordination. As I said, the NATO response to Libya was absolutely done in record time. Another example—we'll get into it in questions—was the response to the Haiti quake. It was fully integrated. The quake hit at five-something in the afternoon. The next morning at seven we had a fully integrated team at Trenton ready to get on a plane to go south—a fully integrated team. There are a few other examples.
In conclusion, we work alongside National Defence. The way we put it is we live in each other's business lines, and this has been something that's developed over the last while. There's always more room to improve, and we're always improving, but we're living in each other's business lines now. It's not just us in Defence, but it goes across the gamut of security institutions with intelligence, RCMP, corrections, etc. This is at the core of what we're doing. It maps out in our bilateral engagements and in our multilateral engagements.
Thank you very much.
