National Defence Committee on March 8th, 2012

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you very much, Ms. Moore. Your time is up. That was a very good question,

especially in light of International Women's Day.

For the committee's information, I just heard from the chief government whip that supps have to be reported back on March 14 to be deemed tabled in the House on the 26th. It is Monday, March 26, so we still have—

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

So we're not just going to be decorators.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

No, we actually get to vote on the line.

Moving on, Mr. Strahl, you have seven minutes.

[Mark Strahl, Conservative, Chilliwack—Fraser Canyon, BC]

Thank you very much.

Again, on the issue of International Women's Day, I also noticed the good planning of the chair and the clerk. I'd like to salute you on having arranged for having these high-level and powerful women, a great example for all Canadians.

I wanted to ask you.... We've been studying readiness, as you know, for quite a while, and it's been raising quite a lot of questions for us about what we need to be ready for. While we aren't issued crystal balls, you are subject matter experts, I would argue. We've talked with some witnesses about threats versus vulnerabilities on which you should be focusing. What are some of the vulnerabilities that you see?

I'm certainly interested in the Foreign Affairs perspective as well around the world. What are the hot spots? Do you anticipate that the Canadian Forces are going to need to continue to be ready for a full-spectrum operation, or are we going to be looking more towards counter-insurgency still? Or are we looking more at cyber-security threats or little flare-ups? What do we need to be preparing for that will allow us to determine how ready we are to address those vulnerabilities? An easy question to start.

[Kerry Buck]

We will first of all talk about how we monitor the security environment. We will then touch on some of the thematic threats and maybe some of the regional areas we watch. Then Jill can speak to the global context from a perspective of defence and CF readiness.

At the core of any foreign ministry is a mandate to track current conflict trends and map out future ones. We do so through our network of missions abroad—geographic branches and headquarters. In my realm, we look at stabilization, human rights, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, conventional weapons, terrorism, and transnational organized crime. We have a methodology for tracking things that we think might turn sour, where state fragility is increasing and might require engagement by Canada. When I talk about engagement by Canada, I don't necessarily mean hard military engagement. We have a range of engagements we can use—soft security, hard security, and a mix of those. It depends on where and what the issue is.

We have a framework for analyzing situations of acute fragility of state. We ask whether there are intense social tensions or violent conflict, whether there is pervasive criminality, whether there is local capacity to address those things, whether the government is in step with basic international norms on human rights or the rule of law, and whether there is deep and widespread deprivation. If we get affirmative answers, we are in a situation of acute fragility. It's probably somewhere we are going to want to intervene.

Then we ask questions regarding when we would engage. Is there a direct or indirect threat to Canada? Is there an alliance or a multilateral response to which Canada would be expected to contribute? It's in our interest to build those networks and promote the rule of law. Have we been invited to engage? If we haven't, if it's a question of a harder military intervention, is there a legal basis to engage? There's no one list of questions. There is an analytical framework. When we're looking at a situation that's worsening, we never do this analysis alone. It's us, DND, CIDA, and others who are in the international portfolio. We have a whole host of mechanisms for this depending on what the problem is.

At the same time, I work with all of the national security departments, and we monitor direct threats to Canada. For instance, transnational crime in Central America—what's coming to our borders? Once we figure out what's coming to our borders and where it's coming from, then we'll push our programming out. We'll push our interventions out to try to address those at source. We call it “pushing our borders out”. If we know one port in Central America is a major transit route for narcotics, there will be military training of some of the military in that region to interdict the narcotic traffic and to look at some of the maritime routes. We'll be training border guards with CBSA. We will be helping to train police. There's a whole range of tools we bring to bear. That's how we do it.

It's hard to come up with a list. Everybody has a different list of fragile states. OECD's DAC has one. I think it has 30-odd states on it. I'm not going to go there and say we're watching all this, but I can say there are some hardy perennials right now. Central America is a focus now, and it's going to be a focus for a while. There are some amazing successes in the region. For the next while, we have our priorities, which are Afghanistan, Sudan, and Haiti. These have been set for a couple of years. I'll just put those out, but there are other areas where we're watching fragility up and down and how it's going.

Then, as I said before, we choose a Canadian niche engagement. We're good at high-level police training. We're good at non-proliferation programming. We're very good at military training.

That's the overall context for how we watch hot spots.

[Jill Sinclair]

Mr. Chairman, may I supplement that? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Strahl.

What do we need to be ready for? Uncertainty. And I don't mean to be trite by that. If we just look at the news today, who would have thought we'd need to be getting ready to send a foreign minister to Burma, and who knew that we'd have to be getting ready for continuing revolutions in the Arab world, which are so very uncertain?

CFDS, the Canada First defence strategy, maps out that in fact we do have to be ready for everything. You talk about threats and vulnerabilities. Of course, vulnerabilities can become threats pretty quickly.

We're always trying to anticipate. We've been told to make sure the home game is safe and that we can do everything we need to protect Canadians; make sure we're there for our continental partners, for the United States, and that includes, as Kerry was saying, looking at the Americas; and then make sure that we need to do what we need to do out in the world.

You asked about whether we need to be ready for full spectrum operations? Unfortunately, we're in an era where there's much more uncertainty and instability than anything else. All of the old kind of givens have shifted. So at the moment we're getting ready for everything from the traditional kinds of military conflicts, because they still exist in the world—and we've seen that, as we've been engaged in things like Libya and Afghanistan—right through to, as you point out, the new sorts of challenges out there, which are cyber asymmetric threats. You have to look at everything. That's the “what” to be ready for.

The question, really, in the readiness bit, is how do you get ready for it and what's your level of ambition with regard to your ability to deal with it? That's where you start to get into the realm of “you can't do everything all the time”—even the United States can't. But how do you offer those niche capabilities? How do you make sure that your response is a joined-up response so that you're not just looking at the military? This is because, in many cases, the best instruments we have are going to be early intervention through development assistance, effective diplomacy, getting the CBSA out there, doing the corrections thing. The military is a very finely tuned instrument, also an expensive one, and you want to deploy it when you really need it.

I don't mean to be trite in my response at all.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

No, we appreciate it.

The time has expired.

Mr. McKay, you have the floor.

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

It's interesting that Christine hit on the notion that's it's International Women's Day and we have a women's panel. The question I'm going to ask will not be in your briefing notes. It essentially is about the strategic value of women, and the strategic value of women operating in some societies. I think you can draw a direct correlation between fragile states and oppression of women. If it's not a 100% correlation, then it's darned close to a 100% correlation.

The interesting aspect is that it is not simply the one side of the equation, which is the integration of women in our diplomatic corps and our military and CIDA; it is your very presence in those fragile stages, those countries of intervention, that stimulates and causes a conversation about the role of women in those societies. Frankly, sometimes your presence just irritates, in many ways, the established order of that society. The correlation is that not only are you irritating to the established order, and therefore that established order has to respond to your very presence, but your presence also stimulates the conversation in that larger society. So the established order has to respond, in effect justify their exclusion from the state decision-making and active involvement in society.

I'd be interested in your thinking with respect to the strategic value of women operating in the Canadian Forces, the Canadian diplomatic corps, and CIDA, as it relates essentially to the oppression of women and whether you've made any observations.

In particular, I'd be interested in your reflections on Mr. Karzai's recent announcements. We've poured billions and billions of dollars in there, and I assume that we've been ably represented by the best and the brightest, yet we seem to be going backwards. Just give us your reflections on your presence in those societies, particularly Afghanistan, but there may be others as well—in 25 words or less.

[Kerry Buck]

To boldly go where no man has gone before.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Kerry Buck]

Sorry.

On the strategic value of women, I'll make three points, and some of these are personal reflections of someone who's worked on peace and security issues for a couple of decades now, actually more than that.

Women are, as I call it, the canaries in the coal mine. When you see state fragility, political transitions...look at the position of women in a society and you can almost start to predict where state fragility might go, and predict the differential impact on women.

We've done a lot of work internationally in Canada, etc., on the particular vulnerabilities of women. Sexual violence in conflict is still going on at alarming rates in spite of all the efforts. It's something we need to, and we do, address, but we need to keep trying.

On specific vulnerability, in a lot of the fragile states women are the economic generators in agriculture areas, the invisible market, and those are some of the areas that are hit first when a state devolves into conflict. They're also caring for more of the family, so they'll get hit a little worse from an economic perspective.

So women are canaries in the coal mine. Watch where they are. It helps you measure how badly a state might end up doing, and how badly the women are going to fare, because quite often they'll fare worse.

Women serving as models/irritants—I like that—to the established order in fragile states. It's not us as western women coming in and steering these things that I think is the key game changer. I think it's the women in those countries, and it's really important.

I met—and Chris can speak to this—some very strong Afghan women MPs, and every time I'd go back to Kabul I'd be meeting some different MPs and different women police in Kandahar. Why? Because somebody I met with the time I was there before had been killed and assassinated after my last trip. These women would just keep coming forward, putting themselves forward for election, and putting themselves forward as policewomen in Kandahar. Incredible courage. We're not in the same ballpark as those women who are leading, the women in Egypt in Tahrir Square, etc. You're seeing women at the vanguard of these changes as well, and they are the ones who are particularly vulnerable in places like Afghanistan. But I also think it would be a mistake to idolize.

As a personal reflection, at the Arusha peace talks after the Rwandan genocide, I remember a Tanzanian woman minister very strongly saying, if women had been running Rwanda, the genocide wouldn't have happened. A Rwandan woman stood up and said, yes, it would; there were women participating in the genocide.

So we have to be careful as we approach this. Women are integral parts of society. They're not always the peacemakers and peace bringers, so when we approach an integrated intervention or engagement in a country, we have to take into account the different roles women play, the different political leadership roles.

On Karzai's recent announcement, we've been pretty tough back at him. I was in conversations a couple of years ago with President Karzai, where he was absolutely lauding the progress they've made—300,000 girls in school, etc. Sometimes you'll see political positioning from the man that is unacceptable, and we make it very clear on that front. We'll see where he goes on this issue or whether this is just an aberration, and we're watching it really closely.

[Marie Gervais-Vidricaire]

Let me add something that relates to a comment that was made to me recently by somebody who was very close to the training of officers who participate in peace operations in Africa.

He was saying that he had heard from African leaders that they were quite concerned, in fact, about these African women who participated in the training to be peacekeepers. They were coming back to their homes with a completely different attitude, and that was creating many problems. They were leaving their husbands and so forth. His conclusion was that it's not a good idea to send women to these training sessions because they come back with all kinds of crazy western ideas.

We have to continue to make sure that women are part of this training, but at the same time we have to realize what they're facing when they go back to their country.

[Jill Sinclair]

I just have a final word from my perspective. It's a great question, but it's all about broader societal change, right? It's all about culture, and that's what Marie's point is all about, that integrating women....

I think the Canadian example and the model, to get back to the earlier question, saying Canadian women in the Canadian Forces just.... We've all been around Foreign Affairs and Defence for nigh on three decades, and there weren't many of us when we started off. For Canada it's been a no-brainer for a long time.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Time has expired. Everybody's gone over eight minutes today.

Mr. Norlock, you have five minutes.

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

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Through you to the witnesses, thank you for coming.

I guess I come from a different level of government. I'm just going to preface my question by saying that it's nice to say that we do things, but then you find out, in my end of the world, that any of the problems that went down had to do with a lack of direct communication.

This question would be primarily for DFAIT as it relates to the CF. But it could be the reverse. To be more specific, given the nature and scope of your responsibilities in the planning and execution of reconstruction efforts in nations that have undergone turmoil, whether it be a natural disaster or political upheaval, what is your relationship with officials at National Defence? How do you coordinate with your counterparts at National Defence to ensure the efficient and effective delivery of service?

It's nice to say that you do it. But how do you do it? Are there frequent meetings? It's nice to say that we sent them a memo, but somebody has to read that. You have to ensure that they have. What is the official mechanism? The “how” is what I'm asking about: how do you do that?

Perhaps I will ask Ms. Buck, Ms. Gervais-Vidricaire, and then Ms. Sinclair, back and forth.

[Kerry Buck]

I'll start. In my introduction, I said that we live in each other's business lines, and it's true. There's no one mechanism. There are hundreds and hundreds of them, depending on the issue and depending on how we need to work together at headquarters, in theatre, and at a post. I can give you a couple of examples.

First, for day-to-day interactions, from the deputy ministers on down to the working officers, for every international security issue we're on each other's speed dial. I couldn't count the number of interactions a day between policy officers at this level—me and Jill, Marie and Jill. It's pretty good, and it has changed.

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

If you don't mind, would I be correct in saying that there's no general way you do it? In other words, there's no official structure. It just depends on the issue.

[Kerry Buck]

Well, there are official structures. I was getting into that. I was just trying to explain the culture.

For fragile states, there is a DM committee on fragile states in conflict that meets regularly. It is joint CIDA, us, and DND. Then we have governance boards for Canadian policing arrangements, for instance, or for START, writ large, etc. DND will be part of those discussions.

When we go to a specific military operation, we have structured working groups for specific interventions. On Afghanistan we had an integrated task force.

It will show up in different ways. On the Haiti quake response, for instance, we had at the beginning, three times daily, task force meetings between DND, us, CIDA, and a host of other people across government.

There are different, very structured ones.

I won't get into all of it, but around NATO, NORAD, etc., there are some structured committees that allow us to come up with integrated projects. They are structured within Canada and with partners. Then we have a whole web of political-military and military-military structured dialogues with other countries, our key partners. We do that together. We'll shift lead. We'll shift chair. We'll share chairing, depending on which one it is.

We let 1,000 flowers blossom.

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

There are official protocols. I hate to mention anything that's current, because of course in my world that gives somebody else an opportunity to open up something that was not intended. Let's say that in some foreign country this morning something occurs that may engage Canada in some kind of direct response because of international agreements, etc. When you get to your office, does somebody tell you to call somebody? Or is there a protocol that says that when these things occur you should contact so-and-so and so-and-so to make sure that, if required, there is an integrated response?

[Kerry Buck]

We're going to give an integrated response.

[Jill Sinclair]

Yes, we are, in fact.

It's a really great question, and I think we've all been around long enough to say there's been a tremendous evolution in this relationship. What your question gets to is that there actually is a culture of integrated cooperation, and then there are the formal mechanisms through which we play that out.

There really is a culture, and I'm not just saying this for the committee's sake. If we look at the headlines in the morning and say, “Good gracious! Tuvalu, or wherever, is going up in flames”, the first thing we do is say, “Okay, where is Foreign Affairs on this? What are we seeing from our embassies abroad?”

Our embassies abroad, under the head of mission, act as a whole-of-government integrated team. I talked about our defence attachés. They report to the head of mission. They're part of this integrated approach to how Canada is looking at this. As we consider what the response mechanisms are, it's immediately to Foreign Affairs. What's the government's approach to this? What do we think makes sense? What are our allies doing? What assets does DND perhaps have out in that part of the world that we could call on?

The integration and culture of cooperation goes from the fact that we're on each other's e-mails, so we're in continual contact. We all copy each other. The lines between the departments for that strategic level of analysis and cooperation are totally erased, I can say.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

We're moving on to Mr. Kellway.

[Matthew Kellway, NDP, Beaches—East York, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

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

I have a point of order. There was a finishing of the thought, and I believe that Madame Gervais-Vidricaire had something to say to that.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Unfortunately, time has expired. I'm going to have to move on to be fair to all the committee members.

Mr. Kellway, you have the floor.