National Defence committee  From a macro sense, I would certainly mirror a lot of the comments you made, in saying that we've seen this to be very worthwhile as a military capability piece, a very worthwhile experience in working with some allies with whom we don't spend a lot of time. With respect to les

National Defence committee  NATO works under some principles of common capability and common operating procedures, but you need to recognize that for some of the newer NATO countries certainly, they're in transition from primarily Soviet Bloc infrastructure and slowly making the investments to come up to a

National Defence committee  Certainly one of the areas that Canada offers a lot of training in is languages, through our military training cooperation program. At senior levels in many of the new NATO countries, English is spoken quite well and widely, but sometimes if you had been down at the tactical leve

National Defence committee  There are a couple of facets there, sir. One is that I spoke of the readiness action plan and the subsequent steps that NATO is initiating, as agreed to at the Wales Summit. This speaks to an enduring presence both from a command and control capacity—so involving some headquarter

National Defence committee  As I mentioned, certainly the operational planners have returned home. They had gone and helped NATO with a lot of this readiness action plan work that has been going on, and working on a number of contingency plans. So that work has ceased. The Baltic air policing mission will

National Defence committee  Sir, much like the time we were talking about the Philippines, as you'll recall, I'd have to defer the discussion around that to colleagues from the ADM Fin CS, and the CFO. Quite frankly, it's not part of my portfolio to manage the resources of the department, and I certainly ha

National Defence committee  No, I think the answers were quite thorough.

National Defence committee  We usually make an estimate before missions, but we identify the specific costs at the end of operations.

National Defence committee  No, the chief financial officer is responsible for that, not me.

National Defence committee  There are a number of standing NATO groups: there are some in mine countermeasures, and there's the one that we're in. The ships that are within it vary from time to time. We've been operating very closely with a Spanish ship, for example, which came under Canadian command while

National Defence committee  If I look at the four standing groups, at one point I would have counted roughly 30 ships in total. But they vary. When you talk about mine countermeasures, there are quite smaller platforms up to larger frigates that we have. In the standing group that we've been in, it has vari

National Defence committee  Well, when we speak to interoperability, certainly Poland has their own unique procedures, different weaponry, and the rest, so the opportunity to work with a NATO ally that's not manned and equipped to same level as us is, I think, a useful experience such that if we were to ope

National Defence committee  I would have to turn to my colleague on that. As I say, I don't have a chance personally to interact with them.

National Defence committee  I think if you had General Lawson here, who sits at the NATO table, you would probably be getting congratulatory comments.

National Defence committee  Absolutely. In fact, what I would offer is that with many of our closer NATO allies, if I would speak of the U.S., the United Kingdom, and France, we have many opportunities to work together. We're very seamless in operations. This has come through years and years of working toge