National Defence Committee on Feb. 14th, 2012

[Rick Norlock, Conservative, Northumberland—Quinte West, ON]

Thank you.

[Dr. Douglas Bland]

First, I would say that I'm not convinced that the difficulties of people in other parts of the world imposes a moral obligation on Canada to do anything.

I remember years ago listening to Lloyd Axworthy, when he was foreign minister, speaking about what became responsibility to protect and so on. He said, quite bluntly, that his foreign policy was formed by his Christian values; in other words, we would go around the world helping our brothers. “I am my brother's keeper”, he said, in several speeches.

Canada has an obligation to assist in missions that have some direct relationship to our own interests, and I'm not ashamed to put it that way. Especially in the last few years, I have become more and more convinced that Canada is not an Atlantic nation, as we used to think of ourselves. We're not a peacekeeping nation, whatever that meant anyway. What we are is a western hemispheric nation, and by concentrating our efforts in the western hemisphere—in the Caribbean, and so on—there are all kinds of connections to our national interests, whether it's trade or immigrants or health and welfare and drug-related issues, and crime and so on.

The scattering of the 60,000 people in the Canadian Forces sounds like a lot of people, but at any good football game in Toronto there will be more people in the stands—if there are ever any good football games in Toronto...speaking as a kid from Winnipeg. You'll get more people in the stands at a football game than are in the Canadian armed forces.

One of the difficulties with these overseas missions to help the downtrodden is that they don't end, and you get stuck there, so it's only 15 people or 20 people or 100 people or 300 people. It's a difficulty.

One Liberal government several years ago had a great idea: the policy for deployments was going to be first in, first out. So Canada would roar in, put out the fires, get everything set up, and then leave. You'd have the third world countries, for instance, come in and do the rest of the work. Well, it's not possible. When you get in, you're in and it's very hard to get out. We've spent many years—20 years in Cypress—trying to get out of a place where there wasn't any problem.

These are the practical considerations to make concerning your readiness and equipment when you have a very limited armed forces—a very small, specialized armed forces.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Your time has expired.

Professor Skillicorn, do you have a really brief comment?

[Dr. David Skillicorn]

I'll make one quickly.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

We can do it like in question period, 30 seconds.

[Dr. David Skillicorn]

The news has broken today that Nortel was infiltrated thoroughly ten years ago and Chinese companies had access to everything that happened inside that company over a decade. That's an interesting object lesson. Before Canadian forces can be deployed anywhere, we have to know that there really are some Canadian forces. So defence has to become a very active thing, simply to stay where we are.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

I'll move on.

Ms. Moore, you have the floor.

[Christine Moore, NDP, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

My comments will be addressed to Mr. Sokolsky.

At the end of your statement, you talked about the importance of professional military education in maintaining operational readiness. I am wondering about recruitment. We agree that education is in a way the next step after recruitment into the Canadian Forces. But in a context of budget cuts, there is a tendency to apply these to recruitment services. For instance, in the recruitment centre in my riding, which is in a remote area, there were at the outset six positions, but three of these have been cut. The recruitment centre has become a satellite office of the Montreal centre, whereas it was independent prior to that. Currently, only one position is being filled, under the pretext that it is not a priority to fill the other two.

I'd like to know your opinion on this matter. In order to maintain operational readiness, should we not bolster the capacities of recruitment centres and their expertise, or should we continue to apply cuts there?

[Dr. Joel Sokolsky]

As may well happen, the intake of the armed forces is going to go down. That's going to put less emphasis on the need for recruitment. Also, the staffing of recruitment centres in an era in which there are going to be personnel cuts is something that's going to.... You're going to see that, since the expertise of those who are there may well be needed elsewhere. I wouldn't be surprised if in fact across the country the recruitment centres are going to see consolidation.

The downside of this is that the link between the armed forces and the communities may well decline. But I do think that recruitment, particularly in an era in which the strategic input may go down, would be one area where the government may well choose to economize.

We've gone through a period in which recruitment was up. But it's not just recruiting. Once people are recruited, they need to be trained. One wants to use the best people for training, and the best people for the last several years have been tied up in operations.

[Dr. Douglas Bland]

Mr. Chair, if I could just make a brief comment, there's a demographic problem here. It's nice rhetoric in a big meeting, but when people talk to me about recruiting and the armed forces, and so on, I ask the question, who fights for Canada? Young white men, that's who fights for Canada. The armed forces is composed mainly of young men. The disproportionate number of people in the armed forces are young white men. More than that, they're young white men from small villages--lots from the Maritimes, some from the prairies, and some from Ontario and Quebec. But 50% of the Canadian population are women. The armed forces is made up of 15% women. The aboriginal community in Canada is, according to the last census, 4%, 5%, or 6% of the population. They're less than 1% of the armed forces.

The changing nature of the Canadian demographic is going to be a problem in the future if this carries on. When you ask people the reason for this odd distribution, you get remarks such as it's racist or we're not accepting, and so on. I don't think so. I think it's a pretty damn hard life. A lot of people would like to do other things.

[Christine Moore, NDP, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

If there are cuts currently in the recruitment area or if it is not managed as well, are we not running the risk that our operational readiness will be jeopardized in 10 or 15 years, when the people who are currently in these positions will retire?

[Dr. Douglas Bland]

That's absolutely the problem.

The population that we draw recruits from now is diminishing, so we're going to need some other model for recruitment. Frankly, I don't know what it is. Maybe somebody does, but I don't.

[Christine Moore, NDP, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

I have a question I'd like you to answer briefly. We heard about cybercrime. I'd like some clarification. We are told that National Defence is dealing with that. Does CSIS play a complementary role to that of the armed forces with regard to cybercrime? That would seem logical to me. I'd like to know whether they play such a role.

My question is addressed to the person who knows the answer or has some idea of what it might be.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

What the member wants to know is whether there's a formal connection between CSIS and the military.

I think it's a secret.

[Dr. David Skillicorn]

I don't know exactly how these relationships work. Some of them work informally, I know. I don't think there is very much formal connection. It's partly the problem that nobody quite knows who's responsible for anything in this area, so a lot of very scattered things are going on, not all of which make sense.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

For interest's sake, Madame Moore is a veteran. She did serve three years with the forces.

We're now going to go to our other veteran. Mr. Chisu, you have the floor.

He is an engineer and very proud of it.

[Corneliu Chisu, Conservative, Pickering—Scarborough East, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I would like to address one of the issues that I think is important, and you outlined the type of threat, Dr. Skillicorn.

What are the problems and what are the issues with the cyber-threat?

I want to inform you that a report from the European Union's Security and Defence Agenda says that several countries are very interested in preparing for cyber-attacks or potential cyber-attacks.

For example, in 2011 the Finnish government announced plans to invest heavily in developing an arsenal of cyber-defence weaponry, such as worms, malware, and viruses to protect military, government, and private enterprise networks as well as the country's critical infrastructure.

In 2007 there were attacks on Estonia, and in October 2011 there were also attacks on our own parliamentary network and government institutions.

Some of the Nordic countries are highly connected. By 2015 Finland aims to be the world leader in information security.

There are a couple of issues I would like to hear your views on, your balanced opinion.

Is the cyber-threat one of the next important threats against the armed forces? How will these cyber-threats influence deployment readiness if everybody knows where we are deploying and the information is compromised?

[Dr. David Skillicorn]

The problem fundamentally is that so much of what we do in every way is computer-mediated. On the Internet itself it's one gigantic connected system, which was never designed to be world scale, and therefore you can get from one place to any other place and more or less do what you want with not terribly much sophistication, as such things go.

Militaries, in general, have tried to deal with that problem by air-gapping their network from the public network, and that works up to a point. But as several countries have discovered, devices such as USB keys and so on make it relatively easy to cross that air gap, and therefore military networks are not quite as separate as they are often thought of. Organizations in the intelligence world tend to be even more separate and to impose physical constraints on what you can carry across the boundary.

The threat, I guess, is things like having fighter jets show up for mid-air refuelling when the refuellers aren't there because they were told to go somewhere else, and that was done by corrupting some message somewhere inside some system. That kind of idea can be generalized in many different ways.

The trouble is that we build on an infrastructure that was never designed to be secure. Security is an incredibly difficult property to retrofit into any system, but especially computer systems, which are among the most complex things that humans have built.

[Corneliu Chisu, Conservative, Pickering—Scarborough East, ON]

However, the report also says that Canada has interesting expertise, but those capabilities are not reflected in the government. This is Rafal Rohozinski, who runs the SecDev Group.

What do you think about this issue that Mr. Rohozinski is telling us about?

[Dr. David Skillicorn]

There are things that can be done, but there is no magic bullet, and therefore it's a case of hardening rather than solving this problem. The trouble with that is it's the weakest link that gets you every time, and it's very hard in advance to decide from what direction you might be attacked.

Although lots of countries are aware of the problem and they're trying to do something about it, not much optimism is really out there.

[Corneliu Chisu, Conservative, Pickering—Scarborough East, ON]

Turning to another question, if I have time, I would like to ask the panel, what are some lessons learned from the recent operations? What did the Canadian Forces learn from Afghanistan, from the torment in Haiti, and in their domestic operations? What are the lessons learned for future consideration?

[Dr. Michael Hennessy]

I'll jump into the fray.

For years in NATO discussions there was debate over what collective balanced forces meant, and NATO policy had been for years that every nation's responsible for ensuring they have a collective balanced force. Every country kind of iterates how they answer that question differently.

For many years Canada's response was largely we will provide what we provide and fit into a bunch of other resources that others have. I think the operational experience of 15 years is that we need a much more robust internally complete force structure so that we have the command and control, we have much of the intelligence, we have the very esoteric human intelligence types of resources that in the 1960s and 1970s we could rely on other parts of NATO to provide. We need those domestically.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Very briefly.

[Dr. Joel Sokolsky]

I think it indicates we need to have the capabilities to do the job on the ground. It indicates that not all allies will be as committed to the mission as we are, and we have to be careful about that. It indicates that these sorts of conflicts undertaken for the best of reasons can be ambiguous in their moral and strategic outcome, and it indicates that while the public very much supports the armed forces, it may not continue to support the mission.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Time has expired.

Mr. Kellway.