National Defence committee  Currently the United States has installed two land-based systems already in North America. There are systems being developed for Europe. The most effective systems are Aegis missile defence destroyers. Within that current construct, what concerns me is to what degree, as part of

National Defence committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I want to thank you for inviting me to appear today. My presentation is about the future of NORAD and continental defence relations between Canada and the United States. The idea underlying my comments is that the time has come to expand NORAD's role and d

National Defence committee  Canada did not abandon the United Nations; western industrial nations with large-scale military capability, globally deployable, abandoned the United Nations. We are one among many that abandoned UN first-generation, second-generation peacekeeping as of 1995. Can Canada contribu

National Defence committee  I agree.

National Defence committee  The UN will attempt, as it always does, to balance very contradictory principles within its founding document and within its aspirations. We should perhaps continue to encourage that idea and encourage them to reconcile the idea, while on the other hand recognizing that the UN ul

National Defence committee  It would start a good domino effect, where we would signal to other small allies that we will commit for a certain amount of time and that we would perhaps expect another small ally to come in for three years after us, and then three years later we can maybe replace them. It woul

National Defence committee  Yes, but we have to, at the very least, try to set up these reputation effects. That's how the alliance works. The alliance has to work on some sense that everybody is doing their part, and if smaller states feel that they are being abused, such as some people in Canada would fee

National Defence committee  If you would like a more detailed answer, and if you are interested, I invite you to read my new IRPP study on this very subject that was published last month. It is entitled: Accountability for National Defence: Ministerial Responsibility, Military Command and Parliamentary Over

National Defence committee  UN missions, and UN peacekeeping operations in particular, work best when the belligerents have already come to some agreement that they're exhausted, that they need a third party to come in and intervene and simply act as a neutral party to separate them. Missions of that type,

National Defence committee  There are two points. Responsibility to protect and the UN charter are at loggerheads and are deeply in contradiction. That is a major point that needs to be taken into consideration and realized: responsibility to protect, which ultimately denies the full sovereignty of states i

National Defence committee  Let us assume for a moment that we did not retain some kind of capability in Canada to deal with the threat and the bomb had actually exploded. My initial reaction would have been that we should have a sufficient number of soldiers to deal with the consequences of that attack. Th

National Defence committee  Well, first, Canada declared war on Germany on the 9th of September 1939. It's erroneous to say Canada wasn't threatened. Canada was directly threatened. There's a second point that I believe is important to make. Parliament does not decide. It's a prerogative of the crown. You

National Defence committee  If Canada deployed independently on major combat operations, I would accept the point. We, however, do not. Since the Second World War, we have always deployed as part of a larger coalition. We know the larger coalition is going to be led by, and the vast majority of the troops a

National Defence committee  I'm not enthusiastic about that. Simply put, unless we know going into an operation that our ABCA allies--Americans, British, or Australians--are willing to put in a significant amount of force, then I think it's a mission that Canada should look at with a great deal of hesitatio

National Defence committee  It is going to become extremely difficult to mount even these types of operations in the future, as we're seeing--and as you are all living--with the current detainee issue. The fact remains that the options Canada had going into Afghanistan and dealing with those detainees were