The Permanent Joint Board on Defence has been around since the Ogdensburg agreement. In its earliest days, it was, I think, a more vital organization than it is now. At the same time, it's useful. Military and political diplomacy is particularly helpful right now, because, among many other things we don't know, we don't know what Trump's attitudes on this are, either. He came to office with a kind of international expertise that he had gained at New York City cocktail parties, and his basic interest in international relations was the kind of thing where whatever he heard from somebody interesting the night before was what he believed—and what he still believes, apparently.
It's in Canada's interest that the PJBD continue and that it meet on a regular basis. I don't know that it needs to do much more than to be. It's easier to keep something running than it is to create it when it's gone. I think that that's largely the case with the PJBD. It brings senior military people and senior political people together, and it creates a degree of common understanding that you wouldn't get otherwise. It's insurance against the day when it might be needed.
As for putting things on the agenda, one of the things that we may yet find on the Canada-U.S. agenda is the issue of defence spending. A couple of years ago, we had an exercise in our Arctic at about the same time as the Russians had an exercise in their Arctic. Our exercise was 200 Canadian Rangers. Their exercise was 30,000 Russian troops, 14 warships, and all kinds of military equipment. If I were the Americans, what I would want on the PJBD agenda, and perhaps even in a NORAD context, would be to know what the Canadian Army was planning to do about that. We are at the lowest level of defence spending since the Second World War, at least according to Granatstein a couple of years ago. We are at one of the lowest levels we've been at in foreign aid. Making the case that we are effective internationally is undermined by the resources that flow into those two areas of our foreign policy.
From a Canadian point of view, I guess I would like to see greater interest in the Arctic. I'd like to see more co-operation with the Americans, but I would like to see a stronger Canadian hand in that co-operation.