National Defence Committee on May 11th, 2009

[John Keating]

You wouldn't pick up information on submarines. There are something like 80,000 ships today that have these transmitters on board, and the number will increase over time as the requirements change. For submarines, you take a different approach.

I did talk about a series of constellations. The second one is low data rate communications. Low data rate communications can do all sorts of things. We're busy talking to people around the world about sending signals that monitor water levels and water pollution, that monitor other attributes related to what's happening on the earth, and that might be ice thickness or climate change information from remote areas that are sent to a satellite. One of the things you can do that we've talked to our government about is the potential of throwing transducers into the water that detect the sound of submarines going by, and those transducers have little transmitters on board that talk to our satellite. So we can actually monitor submarines through a spacecraft, but in quite a different way.

[LaVar Payne, Conservative, Medicine Hat, AB]

Can the other ships turn their transmission devices off?

[John Keating]

They can, actually. They're mandated to carry those things. They're signatories to the IMO, which requires them to do it. With respect to information and tracking, if a ship is transmitting its signal as it's supposed to, and then it turns it off, interestingly enough it becomes a target of interest. We can track its history across the world. It went from Sydney to the port of London and on to Brazil, but as it approached Canadian waters it switched off its transmitter.

Our software is able to detect all sorts of interesting things—they're called watchdogs. If it turns it off, we flag it up. If it's a Spanish fishing vessel that comes within 300 nautical miles of our shore, we want to know. If there are two ships that come together at sea and stay together, that's unusual, and we want to know what's going on. If two ships are sailing in areas in which they're not supposed to sail too close together, or if they're sailing in an area where whales are supposed to be breeding, or if they're drift-netting in the wrong part of the ocean, the software flags it up for us. So the software enables you to detect people doing strange things. We also have some very clever tools to figure out activities that may be of interest to our authorities, over and above the signal itself, but I can't talk about this much.

[LaVar Payne, Conservative, Medicine Hat, AB]

It sounds quite interesting.

I have another question for Mr. Coates. You talked about the lack of scientific capacity to support defence operations. Will the $2 million in the new high Arctic research station help to improve information data?

[Dr. Kenneth Coates]

There's no question that the money will help. I was talking to some folks from the Arctic Institute shortly after they received some of the funding, and they were absolutely delighted. They were describing the new research activities that would actually go on as a consequence of the funding. So the money is a welcome addition.

Lest you think that academics never come here but to ask for more money, part of the challenge is making it clear that all universities, colleges, research institutes should be engaged in this. It's not asking for more money; it's asking us as Canadians to use our money to put faculty members up there in these places.

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

Ms. Neville.

[Anita Neville, Liberal, Winnipeg South Centre, MB]

Thank you.

Would you like to continue, Dr. Coates?

[Dr. Kenneth Coates]

I would just encourage you, as you look at these challenges, to remember that part of the solution lies in getting everybody to participate. The solution is not always governments coming in and giving more money for more things. If this is a national priority, then all Canadians should be part of the solution, and universities should participate.

[Anita Neville, Liberal, Winnipeg South Centre, MB]

You anticipated part of my question. You talked about the current threats and issues, and then you said we had to look forward. We know that the current situation does not allow the indigenous peoples of the north to develop the tools they need to address global warming. How would you provide resources and leadership to the Inuit? How do you see the role of the rest of Canada in addressing the north?

You made a comment about how more people go to Florida than go up north, and then we heard the comment that we have to monitor the tourism of the north. How do you reconcile all that?

[Dr. Kenneth Coates]

You guys ask really great questions—this is wonderful.

How do you monitor and reconcile these things? It's a hard challenge. Tourism is one of the fastest ways of bringing resources, money, and jobs into a community, but it's environmentally disruptive if you don't do it properly. I think a lot of this goes back to aboriginal control, local control, local influence in decision-making. You bring in tourism and other things you can monitor and control yourself.

The question of how we get indigenous communities up to speed on these things is really quite fascinating. I'm a huge fan of aboriginal self-government. I'm strongly supportive of the land claims process and the implementation thereof. As an historian, I would remind everybody here who takes the longer view that 30 years ago nobody would ever have thought we would be where we are now. I was in the Yukon in 1973 when the land claims process started. If you had said that by the year 2009 we would have what we have today, people would have thought you were crazy. There were only a few folks who even dreamed of getting this far. We have a long way to go, but give the indigenous communities a huge amount of credit for what they've done, for their ability to make their own decisions, to get involved and engaged where they can. It's actually worked out far better than we think. There are some great success stories going on already.

[Chester Reimer]

I would add that there's a great opportunity for Canadians. The Arctic is so big right now, and the Canadian government could miss the boat on that. If the Canadian government, the Department of National Defence, sits down with the Inuit and asks them that question in a more appropriate forum, in a more formal forum, there'd be a lot of synergy happening between the Inuit and those in the south. We are already seeing it in the arts and music; we have presidents of France coming and buying Inuit art. It's there. Why are Canadians in the south and members of Parliament here not taking advantage of that in a mutually beneficial way?

[Anita Neville, Liberal, Winnipeg South Centre, MB]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

Thank you, Ms. Neville.

Now, Mr. Hawn.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Thank you, Chair, and thank you all for being here.

For Mr. Keating first, a fairly technical question. It was alluded to that sometimes ships will turn that off, and you mentioned pirates. Obviously, pirates would tend to be non-cooperative targets. What ties do you have or are you contemplating, or are there, if you can talk about it, to space-based radars that would obviously correlate all that information?

[John Keating]

Thank you for raising that because that's an important point. I was talking about our ability to detect signals and what that might mean for somebody who was transmitting and stopped transmitting.

The intention of the Canadian government is actually to fuse this information set with other space-based information using radar systems. MacDonald Dettwiler, which some of us will remember from the ATK episode from a year or so ago, are in the process of designing and developing a space-based radar system. But all the radar system can do is show that there's a target there, there's a ship there. The trouble is, it doesn't know who it is. So it's a real problem, if you're a coast guard or a fisheries or a security agency, to know who they are.

The combination of AIS-space-based data and radar data is incredibly powerful, because you see all the people who are there with their radar blips and you can say, “Who's identified themselves?” Then you can say, “Who hasn't?” So who's there and not identifying themselves? That makes for not only a tremendous amount of useful information, but it makes for tremendous efficiency.

The traditional way of dealing with something that's more than 20 miles offshore is to have an airplane going up and down and up and down and a boat going up and down trying to figure out who's over the horizon, whereas with this system you can actually direct people to the place you want to go to and recognize that that's the target of interest, there's a blip but he's not signalling, and we want to see why he's not signalling.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

That's great. Thank you.

I have a question with a bit of a preamble, and, to me, it's going to be a fairly core question. This is for Professor Coates and Mr. Reimer.

We talked about the application of self-determination and self-government. There are some practical limits to that, and I'm interested in getting your thoughts. Canada is a very large country, and obviously the north is a very important part of that and the Inuit obviously are a very important part of that.

What practical limits do you see to their input into either military affairs or resource development and so on, and to what extent do you see the Inuit being able to determine or have some kind of a veto or greater influence on the broader Canadian national interest? Who determines the Canadian national interest in the north?

[Chester Reimer]

I'll be brief, given the chair's bell.

Who determines Canadian national interest in the north? Well, as the sovereignty declaration says, it's a partnership. By law, Canada has to listen, and by law, Inuit have to talk with the government. There's never been a hesitancy to do that, so that's who determines Canada's national interest.

There are also international mechanisms that this committee should be aware of, whether Canada has signed onto them or not, such as the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. But there are other international human rights mechanisms that you're required to address politically and legally. So there's an international way. We're not living in a microscopic world anymore; we're living internationally, and the Inuit are an example of that, living across four nations.

Certainly, national interest in the Arctic is fundamentally based in the land claims agreements. But it goes beyond international agreements. There is also good old-fashioned talking to each other.

[Dr. Kenneth Coates]

Quickly, I think what you'll see is the Government of Canada representing the government and the people of Canada, as they have in the past. It will be with the kinds of consultations and discussions you've had. There will be times when there's lots of time for discussion and times when it's basically a heads-up because you'll have emergency issues and things of that sort.

One of the things to also keep in mind when you think of self-government and self-determination is that this is a very, very long process. Indigenous communities are very small. They do not have a lot of skilled people, because a community of 5,000 people has a limited number of skilled people regardless of what ethnic background they are. What you're finding as you go across the north is that communities are taking up different kinds of responsibilities at different paces, and often focusing on health care and economic development and education first and other things coming down the line.

Quite frankly, and perhaps Mr. Reimer can say if he agrees with me or not, I think an awful lot of this has to do with the question of knowing they are respected, knowing the Inuit voice is heard, knowing there's a desire to listen, not for politeness reasons but because there's something to be learned from Inuit people. I don't think we're there yet. I don't think we've actually proven to the Inuit population that we listen to them ahead of time. That's not a legal issue, it's not a constitutional issue; it's a sort of small “p” political process.

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Preston is next. You have five minutes.

[Joe Preston, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

I'll let you finish that thought, if you have something further there. I know the bell has been very scary to you today, but I do want to thank you, because you've been very informative today.

Professor Coates, in your opening comments you made a statement about northern defence versus sovereignty. Can you expand a little on what you mean? Is one versus the other?

[Dr. Kenneth Coates]

It's an interesting question. Sovereignty is the legal, technical, constitutional issue of who owns what land, and we have a sovereignty issue about where the continental shelf is. You've heard all the UNCLOS debates and that kind of stuff. That's a question of where it is, of where the line is that shows we have official sovereignty over it.

You can have sovereignty over a piece of territory in a technical international sense and not be able to defend it. I invite you to visit any one of a dozen countries in Africa that have technical sovereignty. The boundaries are all still as fixed as they were when they were artificially drawn years ago, but that doesn't mean the country defends them.

That's the line I would draw. I think we need to put a lot more attention on what we have the capability to actually oversee. My definition of defence is a very broad one. I think we have a defence against ecological change and ecological disaster and a defence against not just the militarization and whether somebody's going to attack Ellesmere Island--highly unlikely and almost certainly not going to happen--but whether in fact we have the defence against all the other threats that might come in, things that we don't quite understand.

That's the line I would draw.

[Joe Preston, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

You just broadened the definition of the defence piece, or, if you will, you drew back the definition of sovereignty to what we're capable of defending once we claim it. That was my point. If it's all about defence, then it quits being about using it; it's about protecting it more than anything else. But you've added some other stuff.

That was the only question I had, so--

[Chester Reimer]

Could I just jump in?

I would go a bit beyond what Professor Coates is saying, in that sovereignty isn't just about who owns the land and where it is. As the second section of the sovereignty declaration in front of you says, there's an evolving nature of sovereignty in the Arctic. I think Canada would do well to look at that. There are different interpretations of what sovereignty means in the Arctic, and I don't think that just because it's not cut and dried in the way Professor Coates said doesn't mean that we don't move forward on it. I'm sure Professor Coates didn't mean that's the only way sovereignty is defined, but we're looking at it more broadly.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

In the last minute I have a question for Mr. Reimer. How are the Russian Inuit--or the Danes, or the Norwegians--doing with discussions with their governments? Do you have any contact or dialogue with them about how they're doing, with respect to the Russians in particular, in addressing their self-determination concerns with their government?

[Chester Reimer]

Although there are close to a million indigenous individuals and about 40 peoples in the Russian Arctic, there are only 2,000 Inuit, and they're in Chukotka. If you know your geography and the Bering Strait, that's where they are. There have been some advances, but it's--