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.