National Defence Committee on May 13th, 2014

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

If you have four ships in some area of the Pacific and no tanker or supply ship, do you beg or borrow supplies from other allies? Or do you have to pull them back and keep them back? How do you deal with that?

[LGen Stuart Beare]

Thanks for that.

Everything we do in the maritime, air and land domains is supported and enabled by a collaborative support framework.

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

Okay, so you work with the U.S.

[LGen Stuart Beare]

Absolutely.

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

Talking to a naval officer recently, the comment was that we'll always be the last priority, so we get the dregs of what's left over after they supply their own fleet.

[LGen Stuart Beare]

I'd offer that has not been our experience in operations nor in the training we do with the—

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

So ongoing, do we need to replace the Protecteur, then? As one of our other witnesses suggested, in the constrained era we're in, should we be relying on our allies for resupply while we provide some other kind of capacity they don't have, and do that kind of collaboration? Is that in the plans?

[LGen Stuart Beare]

The design and delivery of this generation, the next generation of maritime capability, is in the hands of the command of the navy and strategic leadership. I'm not going to go into what their choices are, but what I can assure you is notwithstanding how many vessels of what type we have today, we are incredibly effective in the operations we're doing today because they're based on partnerships.

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

Great.

My last question is around the budget cuts that have affected training budgets. I understand that there has been a severe reduction in training missions, especially to the Arctic. What is the reduction in the cycle of training or the volume of training? Is it 50%? Is it 20%?

[LGen Stuart Beare]

Thank you for that question. The realities are that there are four major consumers, five if you count special forces command, of the training program: the service chiefs who train their maritime, air and land forces for general-purpose combat capability, and special forces for their high-end capability.

Then as a joint operation commander, my training responsibilities are to take those inputs and put them into exercises, which are like rehearsals for contingencies in the future. To be specific, in the north Operation Nanook is the opportunity we provide to bring our people into the north to operate alongside northern partners and federal partners, to rehearse the kind of contingencies we could foresee coming in the future and leaving behind at the end of the experience more capacity, more capability, and more understanding of each other, of how we do our business.

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

How is that—

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Norlock]

Thank you very much, General.

[LGen Stuart Beare]

—no cut in that budget.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Norlock]

We're 20 seconds over.

Ms. Gallant, for five minutes.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and, through you, I will adhere to our study of North America as opposed to Nigeria. We all care deeply about the girls who have been kidnapped and we wish our civilian forces who are cooperating with those agencies all the best in finding them.

It was an extreme pleasure to have Admiral Truelove, on the Pacific coast, host our NATO parliamentary associations when they came from Europe to study Pacific security in North America. He gave a very kinetic overview of what was going on, took us on brand new patrol ships, patrol boats that were new, built on time, and on budget. As well, we learned about energy security on that. But if you're speaking to him, please let him know how much we really appreciated what he did, and how it continues to be of interest, and our Arctic sovereignty is also of concern to our NATO partners.

In terms of the study that we're doing right now, reference was made to Operation Nanook. I'm wondering if you can tell us any plans for this coming summer, in terms of what may occur.

[LGen Stuart Beare]

I'll be turning this one over to Greg Loos in a second, with his chapeau, around Operation Nanook. Conceived about 10 years ago, or described 10 years ago, was this requirement to not be episodic, but persistent in a return to exercising our competency, capability, and capacity in the north—not for our benefit, but for our collective benefit. The collective in this context are, in the first instance, municipal authorities, first responders, territorial partners, federal agencies, and the Canadian Armed Forces in our north.

Operation Nanook has moved across different population centres through our north over about eight years and has gone to different places to leave not just an experience in the people who have flown north and come south again, but leave an enduring effect within our north. That is driven by the idea of the Government of Canada's strategy, which is to enhance governance in the north, provide for the safety and security of our citizens in the north and to advance social and economic well-being in the north. Those are the motivators that inform how we operate in the north, and Operation Nanook has been helping, as part of our program of activities in north, to do that.

I'll ask General Loos to speak to the summer of 2014.

[BGen G.D. Loos]

For the summer of 2014, the activity is scheduled to take place from mid-August through mid-September, including deployment out and redeployment back, with the majority of the activity at the end of August and start of September.

We've got two lines of operation. The first is an Arctic search and rescue scenario, with a specific view to testing out some of the ideas and intent behind our international Arctic SAR Agreement that we signed onto a few years back through the Arctic Council work. That's the first scenario.

The second line of operations is a consequence management scenario, with a stricken vessel pulling up on shore somewhere along Frobisher Bay, and we have to deal with that situation. It becomes more a rescue as opposed to a search, involving all of the responders out of Iqaluit.

We offer our training venue as a platform for them to exercise and work on those areas that they think are important to them, and where they have to get better. That's worked really well as an approach to making it a more appropriate whole-of-government venue.

We will see elements from the army, navy, and air force participate. We're also expecting any SAR scenario to have a Danish ship and a U.S. ship participate, and there may well be other Arctic nation observers coming to have a look.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Very good.

What suspicious activity have Canadian Armed Forces members come across in the past in the north?

[BGen G.D. Loos]

What suspicious activities....

[LGen Stuart Beare]

Well, the first thing is that we're not looking for suspicious activities per se, but at what our partners are perceiving as a regular activity in the north. What is our law enforcement seeing as a challenge? What are the Public Safety officials seeing as a challenge? What are the first nations seeing as challenges? We feed that in, to inform our own understanding.

Clearly what we're seeking to surveil is activity in the north that could result in a requirement to respond to a safety or security need.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Norlock]

Thank you very much, General.

Mr. Larose, go ahead for five minutes.

[Jean-François Larose, NDP, Repentigny, QC]

Thank you, Chair.

Welcome to our witnesses.

The approach we are taking here is to ask what is it that we need? What are the tools that we need? What are the new realities upcoming? Mr. Harris mentioned that in the Arctic, 17 out of 33 ships are apparently not operational, and some of them are elsewhere. Now, you mentioned that when it comes to intelligence we know what's going on, but the question here is what are the tools you need to be able to do the job? You mentioned, with your thumbs-up, if I understood correctly, that everything was fine. But at the same time I'm a little confused. We're not going to get those ships for the next 20 years, so what are the threats coming in? What is it that we need?

[LGen Stuart Beare]

I don't want to leave a perception that bringing a modernized fleet of the current warships back into operation is a bad thing. That's a great thing. We're going to get fantastic, new warships, modernized, that will be employable until the next generation comes along. So I don't want to communicate that there's not a desire to see those back in the water as quickly as responsibly possible.

That said, we are seeing an investment in the capability sets we require to prosecute our mandate. Number one is the domain awareness. So space-based surveillance exists, it's improving in terms of delivery to the customer, and more capability will be coming online in the future. RADARSAT Constellation, I believe, you are familiar with—

[Jean-François Larose, NDP, Repentigny, QC]

Basically, if I understand correctly, with the tools that we have right now, we're doing the best we can do. Correct?

[LGen Stuart Beare]

I would say that we are achieving the effect we need to achieve with the tools that we have today, and we will always benefit from having more tools in the future to help mitigate new threats or challenges that may be coming our way. But none of this is being done alone. Again, we're doing this with partners.