Thank you for the opportunity to talk to you today.
Vincent and I will talk about the key findings and recommendations in a report we published with the University of Ottawa's graduate school of public and international affairs in May this year. The report was co-authored by Vincent and me with the support of a task force of a dozen senior retired officials, including deputy ministers of foreign affairs and defence, four former national security advisers, two former directors of CSIS, former ambassadors and others. The report is available online and I'm happy to pass it on to the committee in electronic form.
The report deals with the deterioration of Canada's threat environment and, overall, makes 65 recommendations on what we can do. Many of those recommendations are relevant to the committee's work on China.
The starting point of the report is one that will be familiar to everybody here, which is this: Canada faces a growing range of threats from great power competition, including, of course, the rise of an increasingly aggressive China, terrorism and extremism—both domestic and international—and a range of transnational issues, including climate change, pandemics and so on. The report's core message is that we are not ready, collectively, to address the growing range of threats Canada faces today.
Successive governments in Canada, in our view, have tended to neglect national security issues. To a large extent, we did that because we could. We are blessed by geography in this country; we are sheltered in North America, and we are under American protection. However, our main point in the report is that this luxury is eroding. As these threats intensify, our fear—and this is based on the collective wisdom, in our task force, of quite literally hundreds of years of experience at the highest levels of government—is that we will pay an increasingly high price, because we are not ready to address them. To be clear, China is not the only threat we discuss in the report, but it is, of course, a major and central one.
The committee is well aware of this aspect, so I will go on very quickly. China poses a threat to Canadian interests through cyber-attacks, economic espionage, foreign interference, growing military assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific and so on.
The value add of the report is in this next question: What can we do? Of the 65 recommendations we make in the report, quite a high number are directly or indirectly relevant to China. I'll mention only a couple of broad ones, then Vincent will take over with a few more specific ones.
The first I want to mention is a general one, in terms of our response: the need for a whole-of-society response to the range of threats China poses. The intelligence community cannot respond on its own to most of the challenges I just mentioned. Of course, it has a central role to play, but it needs to work with other partners in the federal government—economic departments and so on—and with provincial and municipal governments, the private sector—think about economic espionage—and civil society—think about, in particular, foreign interference with the Chinese-Canadian diaspora. We need to do a much better job in this country, at this level, with the federal government's ability and willingness to lead, coordinate and share intelligence on threats and advise on how to deal with these threats.
Within the federal government, sometimes, obstacles to information-sharing among national security agencies impede our ability to respond. It's even more of a problem, beyond the national security community, among the rest of the government—economic departments like ISED and so on—and when you look beyond Ottawa at other levels of government, the private sector and civil society. However, these other actors all have an important role to play in dealing with that range of threats.
The second recommendation I want to mention is on transparency. Our first line of defence against many of the threats posed by China—and others, for that matter—is not always CSIS, the RCMP or CBSA. In many cases, it is. In other cases, it's societal resilience—for example, against economic espionage or foreign interference. The target of these threats is not, in most cases, the federal government itself. A lot of factors go into building societal resilience. We could have an entirely different discussion on that, but one is trust in government, which is a challenge in democracies today, including, but not only, in Canada. There's no magic recipe to build societal resilience, but greater transparency has to be at the centre of that.