Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Good morning, everyone. Thank you for giving me those 15 minutes.
It's always a pleasure to be here before the committee. I'm very pleased to be here as part of our integrated defence team with Colonel Irwin, director of NATO policy. As I've said before at this committee, we work as a total civil-military joined up team.
This morning, Mr. Chair, with your indulgence and that of the members, rather than read a prepared statement that you have in front of you, we've circulated a deck, which I hope everybody has. My intention is to walk you through this deck very quickly. It's an overview of NATO to give you some of the background that we think might be helpful to you as you begin your important and very timely work on NATO. It's important because NATO remains the pillar of transatlantic security. It's what the 2010 strategic concept called an unparalleled community of freedom, peace, security, and shared values. It's a foundation stone in Canada's defence and security policy. It's timely, of course, because we're looking towards the Chicago summit, May 20 and 21, where the alliance will continue its work on transformation, modernization, and reform.
So, if I may, I will make a short presentation.
I will do it on the basis of this deck.
I'm going to go very quickly through it.
To outline, I want to give you a sense of the background, the core business of NATO, the structure and governance, very quickly. I hope you'll be hearing from some NATO folks, from the commander of transformation and others, who will be able to give you the details, but I want to give you a sense of the structure and governance, and a little bit on Canada's engagement with the alliance. Obviously, we'll be open for all sorts of questions and discussion afterward.
In terms of historical background, the Washington Treaty is the foundation stone of NATO. In 1949—and just for historical context, that was three years after Churchill gave his iron curtain speech in Fulton, Missouri. That was the context within which NATO was originally established, a political and military organization. We'll come back to these themes a lot. It's not just the military. It's also a political organization. It's an association of countries with shared values, and it is embedded in the principle of collective defence, which we'll speak to a little bit later, and a comprehensive vision of security.
It's all about the transatlantic link. Obviously NATO binds Canada and the United States in an indivisible way with the security of Europe. It's an alliance that has gone through periodic phases of enlargement, even before the end of the Cold War—Spain came into the alliance in 1982. There has been continual transformation and modernization of this alliance.
We have a little map of NATO today. I won't go through it in any detail, but it shows you that we have 28 members. It gives you a bit of a sense of NATO today in terms of its reach and the countries that are engaged through NATO, either as allies or partners or friends or aspirants.
The essence of the alliance is collective defence. It's the bedrock of the alliance. Collective defence means article 5 of the Washington Treaty—an attack against one ally is considered an attack against all. Interestingly, in the long history of the alliance, article 5 has been invoked only once, and that was after 9/11, when the United States was attacked in that horrific incident that we all know.
But the alliance is constantly changing and evolving. In 2010 we looked at our strategic concept. That's something the alliance has done about every decade. It's bad timing, I suppose, that we had looked at the strategic concept last in 2001, just before the events of 9/11, so it was totally overcome by events the minute it was produced. In 2010 we took another look at the strategic concept and we looked at three core tasks—collective defence, crisis management, and cooperative security, which is about partnership. Again, we can come back to all of these issues.
It was all about transformation because the world was changing, and we learned that post 9/11—cyber, weapons of mass destruction, energy, terrorism. There were new things that we had to do in order to make the Euro-Atlantic space safe, but there were also new things the alliance had to do to be a projector of security and stability, not just for allies but for all those who shared our common values.
Here we talk about moving toward Chicago, and I'm sure that will be of great interest to you, so again, we'd be happy to discuss that in the questions. In the spirit of transformation, we are moving toward Chicago, May 20 and 21. The strategic concept of 2010 is shaping a lot of that thinking, because that was just a strategic concept; now we have to actually implement it. There's a lot of detailed work that has to be done in terms of defence capabilities and other dimensions of NATO, and Colonel Irwin and I will be happy to talk to that.
The current NATO priorities as defined, as we go towards Chicago, are operations, capabilities, transformation, and reform.
If I can just make a quick cross-reference back to some of the work the committee has just done on readiness, it's really all about making NATO ready for its task. I think you'll find that the work you've done previously will help inform your thinking about where Canada wants NATO to go, but also where most allies are focusing their interest. Obviously we're drawing on the lessons we've learned from operations in Afghanistan, Libya, counter-piracy, humanitarian assistance. The whole of Chicago is about making sure that we draw on those experiences and position the alliance for its next phase of existence.
I'll say a very quick word on NATO mechanisms. You don't need to get into this too much at this point. As I said, I think you'll have some folks from the NATO secretariat who will be able to walk you through it.
What's important to remember is that NATO is a consensus decision-making organization. You're all familiar with what that means. It's kind of complex in that there are 28 folks around the table with different national approaches, but we work to consensus. It's an integrated civil and military structure.
Here I have to say that Canada, the Canadian delegation to NATO, is the poster child for an integrated civilian-military delegation. We are definitely the gold standard. Colonel Irwin was previously posted to the mission in NATO. There are only about half a dozen truly integrated national delegations at NATO. As I say, Canada is number one in how we bring the civilian and military pieces together.
There are national representations. The governance structure goes from leaders, who will be meeting in Chicago next week, down to what we call the permanent representatives—our ambassadors who sit in NATO on a daily basis.
This is just a little bit more “granularity”, as we say, in detail on the governance structures.
Let me just say a quick word about operations, because I think that's what most people think of when they think about NATO. NATO does crisis management operations and missions. The list here is one that I think is known to most of you: Afghanistan; Libya, most recently; Kosovo; we're doing counterterrorism operations in the Mediterranean, and have been there since the attacks of 9/11; counter-piracy; a NATO-engaged training mission in Iraq, which is where we first started to do a lot of the training and capacity building carried on in the mission in Afghanistan; again, Balkans operations, one of which continues today in Kosovo; and also civil emergency planning.
NATO is supposed to be of functional, practical help to all its allies, and as I say, to those with whom we can work because they share our values. We've learned within NATO that you can't do it alone. It has to be all about partnership.
NATO has long been open to partners, new partners in Europe and new partners outside of Europe. We've listed some of them here. Again, we can speak in more detail about what these mean. They range from the NATO-Russia relationship, which is an interesting one with its own dynamics—again, we can talk about that a bit—to our Mediterranean dialogue, which enables countries like Israel, Jordan, Tunisia, Algeria, and others to have a partnership arrangement with NATO in terms of practical work.
Also, in operations, as you'll all recall from the operation in Libya, we worked with the UAE, we worked with Jordan, we worked with Morocco, and of course, ISAF, which has dozens of countries associated with it in Afghanistan.
I mentioned very briefly NATO-Russia. There is a NATO-Russia Council, and there's a lot of history around this, obviously.
At this point, forgive me, because I should have apologized at the outset for.... There are many NATO experts at this table. Many apologies if I'm going over ground you already know.
NATO-Russia was established back in 2002. It's had its ups and downs, but the bottom line is that there is still a dialogue with Russia on a lot of practical issues. In fact, just last week in Brussels, foreign ministers met, as did defence ministers, and there was a NATO-Russia dialogue around that. You can see some of the practical areas that we're looking at with the Russians.
Finally, a word on NATO as its role is a foundation stone for Canadian defence and security. We were one of the original members of NATO. We helped write the Washington Treaty.
Mike Pearson wrote the famous article 2, which says that the alliance is about more than just the military, it's about the well-being and stability of all the countries within the alliance. That's permeated the work of NATO since the establishment of the Washington Treaty, an absolute pillar of Canada's defence policy. It reaffirms for us the fundamental importance of the transatlantic link. Again, I don't need to remind this committee about what that means for Canada. Our commitment to transatlantic security is in the fields of Vimy and Ypres and Passchendaele and on Juno Beach and elsewhere.
Article 5, that an attack against one is an attack against all, is extremely important to us, but also expeditionary operations. We have to meet security threats where they emerge. That doesn't mean sitting at home getting ready for masses of troops to come at us, we need to be much more flexible and agile as an alliance.
We consider it a primary forum for political and military discussions. The Minister of Foreign Affairs and the Minister of National Defence share NATO as an institution, hence the joint ministerial meeting that took place in Brussels last week.
The priorities for Canada are operations, reform, and transformation.
This has to be an alliance that can do stuff for Canada. It's about having an alliance that's fit for purpose, where we can act together, we can discuss things frankly, we can act in an agile and flexible way, we can keep ourselves open to new partnerships, and we can do our core business. So that's what it's all about for Canada.
With that, Mr. Chairman, I'd like to complete this very quick, and I hope not too superficial, walk-through of NATO, and we'd be very delighted to take questions.
