National Defence committee  My thanks to the committee for the invitation. I'm very pleased to participate and look forward to the discussion that follows. Canada is confronted with a number of complex national defence questions today, and there's a danger that we will lose sight of the less urgent but mor

National Defence committee  I think that's right. I would just add there's nothing new about that. Our relationship with the United States in the Arctic has always been characterized by a kind of mixed agenda, where there are some things where we clearly do not agree and we choose to try to work around thos

National Defence committee  It's true there is political cooperation with them, and some very low-level defence cooperation, but to me it doesn't seem any more prominent than their respective cooperation with a variety of other partners. There has been an overplaying, I think, of the importance of the conne

National Defence committee  They've made a number of agreements recently, yes, but I don't think any of those agreements take away from the fact that their interests in the Pacific are not necessarily aligned. There is no reason to think of the potential threats that might be posed by either of them in the

National Defence committee  I think there's no single thing that we have to do and many of the things that we would have to do in order to have a more ambitious assertion of our presence in the Arctic are things that have nothing to do with NORAD. To the extent that NORAD is relevant to the Arctic, it's mos

National Defence committee  I would agree with that. It's important to recognize that maritime warning, whether it happens through NORAD or not, is an inherently much more complicated thing than air defence or air warning. If we go back to the Cold War context it's really just our air force and the American

National Defence committee  It is a security initiative. It all depends. The information will come up through the process, and then it can be shared in ways that are useful in other domains, but it is primarily a security initiative.

National Defence committee  Certainly there's not much point in just collecting information and not having the capability to do something to act on that information. Whether or not all of those responses have to be things that are managed directly by NATO is a question to be worked out. I guess it depends

National Defence committee  I would agree with that. I think that if we're going to see the direct effect of that hollowing out of our defence capacity in the next 10 years or so, it's mostly going to be with respect to expeditionary forces and not necessarily continental defence. I think if current trends

National Defence committee  I agree. It sort of follows from the question that if we don't have the actual capabilities, then we essentially make ourselves irrelevant, and that is just as true on continental defence as it is on other defence.

National Defence committee  Your question was what the costs would be. There are lots of different kinds of potential costs. There are financial costs, but there are also costs involved in both participating and not participating in terms of other things, like how much of our resources are put into that as

National Defence committee  Sure. I guess my short answer would be that clearly there was a renewal of a commitment to properly fund the forces seven or eight years ago, and that showed some really tangible results. Unfortunately, it hasn't necessarily been followed through on in all areas. People have talk

National Defence committee  It certainly seems like the natural starting point, but—

National Defence committee  Well, the Americans are fully prepared to go ahead and build their own system on their own with little or no Canadian participation, and if they do, then it will be run through USNORTHCOM and other related commands. From their point of view on whether it has to be done through NA

National Defence committee  Well, we already are involved, more or less directly, in a lot of the tracking part of what BMD will be about, through NORAD, and it seems odd that we would think about participating in coordination on a response through something other than the institution that manages the actua