National Defence Committee on May 15th, 2012

[Paul Chapin]

There are two kinds of information sharing. The first is the constant discussions and sharing of analysis and assessments that go on among governments and around the NATO committee tables. The North Atlantic Council has several supporting committee operations. That is fairly frank and fairly comprehensive. Clearly, some information is held back by some people from other people. If you're the Americans or certain other members of the alliance, you have intelligence collection systems and material that has a very special character that you don't share with everybody. It has been a remarkable development in NATO over the past 10 or 15 years how much more intelligence is now being shared within the alliance than used to be the case.

When I served in NATO along with Colonel Pellerin, who is our executive director, back in the early 80s, it was a very difficult thing to get the hard intelligence into the general discussion.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Time has expired, sir. We're going to have to keep moving on.

Mr. Kellway, you have the floor.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Through you, thank you to our guests for coming today and providing a very interesting discussion.

I want to go back a bit. I was kind of surprised to hear your definition of Canada's interests in four areas: North America, the Arctic, the Americas, particularly Mexico, and the Pacific. Picking up on what John said earlier, I was a bit surprised by what you left out of that discussion or list of interests. For clarity's sake, is it these interests plus others, or are you just refocusing? Is your effort in identifying that list to refocus the discussion onto other issues that aren't getting, in your view, sufficient attention these days?

[George Petrolekas]

There are two different things we're talking about. I hope we're not confusing them. The very first thing we said was that there is a hierarchy of national interests. That has become more defined in the environment that we're living in—that environment being influenced by public opinion, the wariness of our public, and also the constraints of the fiscal purse. Bearing those two things in mind, nations have to make decisions on where focal points will be. That is strictly a description of what we're seeing happening around the world. I can give specific examples and demonstrations that illustrate that trend of a sharpening of the definition of national interest.

With respect to areas of interest, if national interest is being sharpened to those first three areas of the hierarchy that I described, then you're also seeing effects of that in areas where nations choose to put their focus. It doesn't necessarily mean they have abandoned particular areas. There is just more focus on those particular areas.

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

You're saying those three...the sharpening of the national interests should be focusing us more on North America?

[George Petrolekas]

They are, in fact, focusing us in those particular areas.

One other thing, just to clarify, is that we did talk in the strategic outlook paper in general terms about Canada and Canada's interests, but there are also limitations when we're talking about the NATO strategic concept. You asked us to comment on where is NATO's thinking in all of this. I think we're in lockstep by saying that NATO has traditionally had a very limited view of what its roles are in other places. We're actually encouraging NATO to broaden its horizons to beyond the limitations of the European geographic land mass.

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

To include our land mass, I take it.

Does it include this North American land mass?

[George Petrolekas]

It includes parts of the land mass where there are areas of interest. Here is an example. The NATO Response Force was designed in 2001 to provide NATO an expeditionary capability and to intervene in a series of places.

Haiti, after the earthquake, had absolutely no NATO involvement. There was a specific mission set that was designed within the NATO Response Force to help out and assist in regions of the world where disaster had struck, and yet NATO has never used the NATO Response Force in that regard.

In Afghanistan, NATO required the NATO Response Force as an election support force but could not find the means or a way to break through the North Atlantic Council to deploy that.

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

Are you calling for more? If NATO is going to stick with that very traditional kind of geographic perspective, are you calling for a more limited role of Canada within NATO?

[George Petrolekas]

No. The very first step is to identify that it is an issue.

The second step is to flag that to our diplomatic intervention to try to move NATO to recognize that it does have interests collectively beyond its borders, which it actually mentions in the strategic concept. It articulates that quite clearly, but it doesn't act on that.

Third is where we would look to satisfy our own interest if the second can't occur.

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

How optimistic are you about the second?

[George Petrolekas]

I try to retain some optimism. It did take 10 years, but there is now a heavy airlift capability in NATO stationed in Hungary, where they bought C-17s, something that was identified—that the alliance as a whole requires heavy airlift. The AGS program seems to be moving along, after fits and starts, but the unfortunate thing is it does take time.

We do think that a nation like Canada, which is generally seen as not having particular geopolitical agendas, as an honest broker can help move our partners in the alliance into the kind of thinking I've described.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you. The time has expired.

Mr. Menegakis, you have the floor.

[Costas Menegakis, Conservative, Richmond Hill, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I too would like to thank our witnesses for appearing before us today. I also want to congratulate you for the important work you've done in your careers—certainly very impressive—and the work you continue to do.

My first question is this. In light of NATO's strategic concept, with its three roles or three principal tasks, as I think you refer to them in your presentation, could you describe the strengths and weaknesses of Canada as an ally in delivering on these fronts? Perhaps I will ask you to put a little more emphasis on our weaknesses.

[Paul Chapin]

I'm not quite sure I got the gist of your question. Canada's ability to delivery in what particular—

[Costas Menegakis, Conservative, Richmond Hill, ON]

On its three principal tasks.

[Chris Alexander, Conservative, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Collective defence, partnership....

[Paul Chapin]

Well, if you begin with the first task, which is the defence of the NATO area, the Euro-Atlantic area, our role was absolutely critical early on. We had brigades stationed in Europe, we had an air force stationed in Europe, and we had heavy naval commitments to the defence of Europe. Clearly, over 60 years, that has progressively disappeared. We're not there any more in that respect. So as far as the defence of Europe specifically is concerned, I'd say we're absent, with good reason.

On the second function, crisis management, I'd like to make a distinction between NATO and its members. NATO as an organization has organizational and structural problems of all kinds. It's only as robust and as effective as its members allow it to be. Individual members can be a great deal more active and effective on their own or in small groups. What you've seen in some respects has been individual NATO members either leading the whole organization or leading some of the organization, or creating “coalitions of the willing”, as they are called, of countries that are both within NATO and outside NATO, to get things done.

I think on that front, Canada has been a very important contributor to the collective missions that we have believed in. As a group, we didn't believe in Iraq, but we certainly believed in the Afghanistan mission. We believed in the Balkans missions. We believed in the Libyan mission.

Once we overcame some of the deficiencies of the dark years in which Canadian defence was underfunded and undermanned, we turned out—as most of us kind of suspected we would—to be first-class soldiers and first-class contributors in a highly professional way to solving problems.

So I think we do quite a good job there. I wish our diplomacy was as robust and as entrepreneurial as our military activities have been.

The third one has to do with partnerships. I think we're playing a very large role—we can probably claim as strong a role as any NATO member—in trying to drag NATO into understanding that there are requirements for partnerships. In Afghanistan, for instance, all 28 members of NATO, one way or the other, have been involved. But there are another 20 countries involved in Afghanistan, and not in small ways, either. We're saying that if this is the world of democracies working in action, why is it that we consider these other 20 countries as kind of second-class citizens? We maybe invite them to some of our meetings at NATO, and so on.

What we've been saying is that we have to firm up something with these countries. If NATO as an organization will not do that, we have to figure out some other way to get that done.

[Costas Menegakis, Conservative, Richmond Hill, ON]

How am I doing for time, Mr. Chair?

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

There may be time for a small comment, if you wish.

[Costas Menegakis, Conservative, Richmond Hill, ON]

A small comment? Okay.

My comment is this. Certainly we have a long history and a very proud history of being peacekeepers around the world. I can tell you of one effort that comes to mind, and that is the peacekeeping effort of the Canadian armed forces in Cypress. The longest-serving peacekeeping mission of the Canadian armed forces was there. It spanned 29 years. We lost 28 brave young men and women in that effort, and I think we have a lot to be proud of.

Again, thank you very much for appearing before us today.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you. Time has expired.

Mr. Brahmi, you have five minutes.

[Tarik Brahmi, NDP, Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'd like to follow up on the question that was asked by Mr. Harris at the beginning. It concerns recommendation 7, which includes the rather strong statement that “The doctrines, laws and institutions used for collective security are no longer relevant.”

Mr. Petrolekas, I feel that you didn't have time to answer that part of the question, so maybe I will give you an opportunity to do that now.

[George Petrolekas]

I don't think we said they're not relevant. We said they're past their prime, to be more specific.

I did mention a particular area. I talked about five domains of warfare that are certainly recognized in the United States. Certainly, President Obama has been quite clear in a policy statement he made about four months ago.... At least in the cyber domain, the U.S. President was quite clear that from a U.S. perspective, that was an area that would trigger a defence response.

To just use that as a vehicle to discuss recommendation 7, we have not kept up, from a policy standpoint, in recognizing that field. Certainly, from Canada's standpoint, the thinking about that is not very well developed. I would say it's in its infancy. And certainly from a NATO standpoint, the implications of that U.S. presidential statement have not been thought through. So what do all those things mean? That is one area in which we're saying there are changes that are occurring in the landscape before us that the institutions themselves haven't kept up with.

The second area has to do with.... Geographically, if I might draw people's attention to the South China Sea, and I made sort of a glib remark earlier that this is an area where gunboat diplomacy is alive and well—certainly the standoff that has being going on for close to four weeks between Chinese vessels and Philippine vessels.

Four of our largest trading partners are in that particular region. Some 60% to 70% of the world's maritime traffic transits through the South China Sea. Taiwan is one of our largest trading partners. There have been three major crises over the Taiwan Strait in the last 40 years. The building of the Chinese aircraft carrier, this ex-Soviet Varyag, can be traced back to the third Taiwan Strait crisis, where the Chinese naval expansion began immediately after the Taiwan Strait crisis.

Some 70% of the world's liquid natural gas traffic flows through the South China Sea.

As our own northern gateway pipeline opens and shipping traffic increases from our own shores to the east, our immigration from the east has now eclipsed other areas.

Institutionally, NATO has not looked at that particular area. There is no security structure, except for bilateral agreements right now, that covers collective security responsibilities in that whole area of the world. Yet through the number of examples I've just given to you of why it is of interest to us and why it should be of interest to NATO, the institutions have not incorporated the changes that have taken place.

We're not saying they're not relevant. They were built for a time and place that no longer really exists. I don't think any one of us would be bold enough to make a statement that the Soviet army is going to cross into Germany and march toward Paris today. Yet that is what part of that collective defence structure was built to address. Therefore, it needs to be rejuvenated, and it needs to be brought into a more modern time.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you. Time has expired. It's been exactly five minutes. Merci beaucoup.