National Defence committee  The loss of power in 2003 was very wide in geographic scope, but the key is that it was very brief. Power was restored to the vast majority of customers within 48 hours. If there were either a natural disaster or a man-made attack that caused outages of much longer duration, then we would be in a different world in terms of defence support to civil authorities.

National Defence committee  There was a great improvement in Sandy over Katrina, in part because of the lessons learned. Let me give you a prime example. We were able to use state national guard forces much more effectively, in a much more coordinated fashion, with federal military forces, than was possible in Hurricane Katrina.

National Defence committee  This was because we reached an agreement between the Department of Defense and the governors of each state in the United States for how these military forces would operate more effectively together and give governors a say over the disaster response priorities that these military forces would be carrying out.

National Defence committee  It's something that's being worked on today. We need a binational approach to these severe threats, natural hazards and man-made, in order to provide for infrastructure restoration. There's important progress under way right now with industry, and between industry and government.

National Defence committee  We recently had an exercise, a government-industry exercise, in the United States with strong Canadian participation from the electric industry. The scenario on which that exercise was based had a simultaneous cyber and physical attack on the electric grid. I don't believe our adversaries are going to do us a favour in the future and only attack with cyber.

National Defence committee  We welcome the chance.

National Defence committee  They weren't able to get through the customs system as quickly as we would want, to be able to have that go forward in the future. More generally, we are not prepared in the United States yet for worse events than Sandy where the Department of Defense would be called on to provide support to civil authorities in order to respond to the disaster, save lives, and provide support to utilities for power restoration.

National Defence committee  The civil assistance plan provides a strong foundation on which to build, and it's in the planning realm that I think the greatest progress can go forward. What we discovered with superstorm Sandy is that we did not have the agreements in place to allow for Canadian utility crews to easily come across the border to assist the United States.

National Defence committee  Thank you especially for emphasizing the importance of water infrastructure. People get thirsty fast if water infrastructure is attacked. Scholars in the United States last year, in order to assess the threat to water and waste water infrastructure in the cyber realm, built an imaginary website, loaded it up on the Web, and provided a website and an entry into an imaginary municipal water system just to see whether it would attract cyber-attacks on the industrial control systems that govern the municipal water system here in Ottawa, back in Washington, and across our two nations.

National Defence committee  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.

National Defence committee  Let me begin, first of all, Mr. Chairman, and distinguished members of the committee, by thanking you for the opportunity to share perspectives with you today. I was the assistant secretary of defense for Homeland Defense and Americas' Security Affairs from 2009 through January of 2013.