National Defence committee  I'll go on record to say that I do support the UN, imperfect as it is. It's a good thing we have a league of nations such as the United Nations. It is doing yeoman's work on safety across the globe. It might not be not doing it as well as it could, but getting 100-odd member stat

National Defence committee  I'm neither against it nor for it. I think that as a peace-loving people, our entire government is certainly a department of peace through its foreign policy and its national policies. As to whether or not we need to have such a thing, I'm for less government, not more government

National Defence committee  I'm not sure where to start, Ms. Faille, but let me just say this. When I was a logistics officers with the Canadian Forces, I gained some experience in the field of public acquisitions. Since then, I've noticed that the problem stems from the fact that there are too many control

National Defence committee  The short answer is that I don't know, because I don't know whether there is a “military solution” to it. I say instead that we'll probably have to go back to basics—we, together with our allies—to find whether there is not a better way to structure our national effort and intern

National Defence committee  If I left you with that impression, then I misspoke. I would not support the deployment of a Canadian Forces element rapidly unless there were a real emergency, which I don't see over the horizon. That's first. Second, what I would not do, because of the lesson we have learned

National Defence committee  First and foremost, Canada is a trading nation, and we depend on foreign trade. So to have open sea lanes is absolutely essential, first. Our territorial governance over the sea is important, and we have a vast expanse there; people are coming and fishing in our waters, polluting

National Defence committee  I don't think Afghanistan was new warfare. The use of roadside bombs is about as old as the invention of explosive gunpowder. A roadside bomb is cheap, and it doesn't require a whole lot of skill to construct it, to plant it, and to reap the carnal benefits from it. How to figh

National Defence committee  The short answer is I don't know, because you're straddling the line between diplomacy and military. If there is a way to do it, why not? If anything can prevent the loss of one soldier, it's worth trying, but I don't know how you would incorporate that within the mandate of a fi

National Defence committee  To be blunt and short, I would certainly look somewhere else, and I would use the current experience in Afghanistan to make the point. I think after we return home and we look at all the successes we have had—and I use the word “we” in the broadest sense possible. We, as a NATO

National Defence committee  Mr. Harris, I would be hard-pressed to tell you how many studies have been done of that. In the time that I was in the military, I participated in at least three or four missions that tried to see a way to reduce the size of National Defence Headquarters, which used to consume so

National Defence committee  Mr. Bachand, theoretically, foreign and defence policies are interconnected, but in a linear way. I don't really believe that. Most of the time, countries respond to crises and to emergencies. Since the start of the 20th century in particular, Canada has sent troops into battle w

National Defence committee  We don't want to lose it, and we've acquired it at very high cost. We lost a sailor again over the past few hours. We've acquired this fighting capability, an officer corps, a non-commissioned officer corps, that now is battle-tested, with many veterans. When we come back, I th

National Defence committee  I think we need, first and foremost, to define what the mission of the forces is and what the role of the forces is. From my perspective, they're fundamentally of two types. First and foremost is the defence of Canada—air, sea, and land masses—and whatever this entails. We have t

National Defence committee  Peacekeeping is on a continuum that goes from being a basic constabulary type of mission--and Cyprus would be a good case in point for most of the 40 years that we were there--to Somalia, a robust peace-enforcing, peacemaking type of mission. You could say that the early stage of

National Defence committee  To members of this committee.