National Defence committee  I am not a cyber expert by any means, but I am certainly.... It's very different from other kinds of defence and security issues. Many of those other things take five, ten, or fifteen years from the time we first identify them as a potential threat to the need to respond to them.

National Defence committee  Certainly just the raw fact of their rapid economic growth means that the potential for growing the military is always there. People have been talking about looking in the rear-view mirror and seeing China coming for a long time. The trick is that they are approaching rapidly,

National Defence committee  I know there is police cooperation and some police training.

National Defence committee  I don't know much about whether it's direct. It may be, but I don't know.

National Defence committee  Maybe George will add into this.

National Defence committee  The answer is I don't know whether there are formal negotiations on that, and I also don't know whether there is a formal agreement, memorandum of understanding, or something along those lines that governs the information sharing, but I do know that there is sharing of that kind

National Defence committee  We already have some cooperation navy to navy with Mexico directly, and there certainly is sharing of information, but again I don't know that there's enough need for a permanent kind of arrangement there. I think there's plenty of ad hoc information sharing that goes on in con

National Defence committee  Do we need a navy? Is that the question?

National Defence committee  Yes.

National Defence committee  I guess the answer is yes. I want to go back for just a second to say that BMD is not behind us in the sense that the question has been answered in any meaningful way. I would rather say that the prospect of their approaching us and making a request is probably behind us, and i

National Defence committee  Mexico is sort of trying to answer that question for itself right now, not so much with respect to NORAD, but with respect to NORTHCOM. The Mexican constitution and sort of informal political convention say that the Mexican military is under strict political control and it doesn

National Defence committee  I think there are lots of countries that don't necessarily accept our position on the Arctic, mostly because they interpret differently the rules on what counts as an international strait. You can disagree with a legal position and choose not to challenge it, and I think that's t

National Defence committee  I don't see it happening in the foreseeable future, but as the Arctic rapidly evolves, there may be situations where we may assert a rule, for example, on pollution control, and some countries may chose to challenge that rule, but I don't see any immediate urgency. I don't see an

National Defence committee  I think that's right. The very first thing to say about it is that the kinds of defence and security challenges on that side of North America are completely different from the ones in the north. What this means is that there are different services, departments, and agencies invo

National Defence committee  I would agree with that. My short answer to that question would be that there isn't a defence problem in the Arctic, but there are many problems in the Arctic that might call for the use of defence resources to respond to them.