In this realm I believe defence will always be in support. That's one of the lessons learned from the revitalization of the Permanent Joint Board on Defence over the past few years. The PJBD took on, as a core area for work, the question of how the Department of National Defence could be in support of Public Safety Canada, the Department of Homeland Security, and other agencies in order to strengthen the resilience of infrastructure on which national defence and national security depends.
There are very few dollars in the Canadian defence budget, or the U.S. defence budget, to strengthen resilience of infrastructure, even though it's absolutely vital to national defence. So the question is this: how can government and industry partner together to make sure the investments go forward in the way they need to? And how, in the Canadian system, can provincial governments that have so much of the regulatory authority over infrastructure be brought into this dialogue?
In our country we need much deeper federalist approaches that bring federal, state, and local dialogue together with the private sector above and beyond anything we've ever had before. This is an opportunity to do it not only within the United States but in close partnership with industry and the Government of Canada.