Government Operations committee  The simple answer is that Canada is a maritime country, but we have what's called seawater blindness. The central agencies, particularly the political elites, do not understand how much of the maritime domain of Canada is actually at the heart of both our security and our prosper

Government Operations committee  It's a bit of a silly answer, but it still is true: Expand Baffin Island. Baffin Island has probably one of the world's largest deposits of iron ore. If we were producing it and actually refining it here rather than sending it to the Germans to be refined, that would be one way.

Government Operations committee  I don't know, given the globalization, our participation in a free trading system particularly for natural resources, how we manage that. Look at the difficulty we had in just trying to deal with the attempt of the Chinese to buy the gold mine in terms of any type of instrumentat

Government Operations committee  It's not so much the smaller-class vessels, but you're talking about dry dock. You're talking about the support facilities that are associated with them. Once again, the shipbuilding strategy is about a specific set of platforms—the Coast Guard, the navy. It's basically about wha

Government Operations committee  I can tell you that we're definitely not talking with our American, Australian and British allies as they move forward with the consideration of Australia's next submarines. When we didn't have submarines, as in the period between the O class and the Upholders, we lost control of

Government Operations committee  First of all, I agree with everything that Richard and Elinor are saying. I want to stress to the committee that building a naval ship is a very difficult challenge. The Americans are just about to literally junk an entire new class of vessels. Their Freedom-class littoral ships

Government Operations committee  They actually do fail very badly. Let's be very clear, naval construction.... The French built an aircraft carrier that could not land their largest aircraft. They had to put the De Gaulle back in after she was out for about.... They took her out for the first tryouts and discove

Government Operations committee  Thank you very much. I want to reiterate a point, because I can't make it enough. We're heading into a new security environment that is increasingly going to put pressures on Canadian maritime security. This maritime security, of course, faces a threat from the ongoing battles

Government Operations committee  More so, but once again we haven't talked about the submarine threat. We haven't talked about underwater autonomous vehicles. We haven't talked about whatever the Russians and Chinese come up with that we haven't anticipated. Once again, the Kinzhal missile surprised people, eve

Government Operations committee  Wow. Do I have more than four minutes? It's a brilliant question. It really gets to the heart of why we are talking procurement. We're talking procurement because we have a new geopolitical security environment. Traditionally, we've mainly needed this shield because that was

Government Operations committee  Absolutely. I mean, once again, because of the difficulty of getting information, there are suggestions that have appeared in some media reports that in fact our ability, a spur-of-the-moment capability, to actually deploy our aircraft into the hangars, particularly in the middle

Government Operations committee  We are getting media reports that we are losing pilots and that we are not able to sustain. It goes back to a point that I was raising earlier. Not only do we need to have pilots who can fly the existing fleets; we need to have a surplus. We have to assume, going into the future

Government Operations committee  First of all, I'll remind the committee that in days of yore, House of Common committees provided some of the most cutting-edge information to understand the international system around us. Bill Graham, when he was head of the foreign policy committee, produced a report that I st

Government Operations committee  The other thing that has to be brought in is that we have inversed the role of secrecy. Instead of demanding that we prove what needs to be kept secret, the assumption is we need to prove what can be released. Part of the process would be better served if, as we go through all th

Government Operations committee  Well, we can say immediately, of course, that we do have to update the existing architecture of the north warning system. In other words, the Russians are in the process of modernizing not only their nuclear war-fighting tactical capabilities that we see with the Gazelle missiles