Mr. Chair, members of the committee, good afternoon.
First, may I thank you for giving me this opportunity to attend your meeting to discuss this important matter as part of your study.
Many years ago I served with the Canadian delegation at NATO during the end of the Cold War, and I have a deep appreciation for the capacity of the alliance to adapt to new circumstances while maintaining a crucial traditional solidarity among its members.
At the same time, it is incumbent on alliance members, including Canada, to regularly review NATO activity and determine if it still offers the best value for money. The strategic concept set out some broad directions in specifying collective defence crisis management and cooperative security as the core tasks of the alliance.
While I agree with all these, I would like to see greater emphasis placed on the alliance's consultative role and its potential for conflict prevention. Collective defence remains the foundation of NATO, but in recent years this no longer entails defending ally territory from attack, as much as it does collaboration in defending alliance interests wherever they are threatened.
NATO's unique strength is its integrated civilian-military structures and associated ability to conduct complex major joint operations. This unrivalled capacity to project and sustain forces and to manage effectively a multinational mission is what has made NATO the go-to organization for conducting combat operations on behalf of the United Nations and other groupings of states. This has been the case in situations from the Balkans to Afghanistan, and most recently in Libya. Frankly, the alliance should expect similar requirements and requests in the future.
Canada, for its part, should continue to contribute to maintaining this collective capability and to ensuring that member states contribute appropriately. A smart defence approach should entail some pooling of resources and a development of niche capabilities, rather than trying to have each member possess a full-spectrum capacity.
That is why Canada's decision to withdraw from the AWACS program of NATO sends, I believe, an unfortunate signal, as this was an example of a common NATO program providing a very specialized capability that would have been prohibitively expensive for most of its members to acquire on a purely national basis. The ongoing presence of Canadian Air Force personnel on European soil as part of the integrated aircrews that man the NATO AWACS planes I think also served an important symbolic and political role as a tangible presence of Canadian personnel on European soil, working side by side, literally, with comrades-in-arms from other NATO states.
Building expeditionary capabilities for the Canadian Forces is one way to contribute to NATO's ability to project force, but so is supporting common programs or assisting with specialized capabilities that may be beyond the reach of other allies or partners.
I mentioned earlier that I believe NATO should spend as much time on conflict prevention as it does on crisis management. I think this relates to the consultative role of the alliance—a function that was at the core of Canada's championing of article 2 of the Washington Treaty at its inauguration—and the importance of maintaining NATO as a focus for political-military consultations on the security challenges of the day.
Canada, alongside other non-EU allies such as Norway and Turkey, has to be especially assertive to sustain this crucial role for the alliance because the current tendency is for the EU, on one hand, and the United States, on the other, as the big boys, to go off and do their own internal consultations at our expense. If Canada's wish to see NATO as a political alliance as much as a military one is to be more than just a rhetorical goal, it will require re-energizing the alliance's consultative mechanisms and developing headquarters and delegation efforts to this end.
When I was serving at NATO, the alliance's political committee, for example, had regular consultations on arms control and disarmament issues and regional security concerns. My impression is that there has been a steady decline in this type of collective assessment and strategizing, which is vital if the alliance is to stay ahead of the curve and engage in conflict prevention programs and not only in crisis management sessions. These political consultations should be essential if the alliance is to be an active contributor to international security through diplomacy and disarmament, and not just via the use of force.
Despite the strategic concept and the deterrence and defence study it mandated, the alliance still clings to a retrograde and obsolete policy on nuclear weapons. There's an absurd element in its conclusion that as long as nuclear weapons exist, NATO will remain a nuclear alliance. Clearly, as long as NATO retains such weapons, they will continue to exist. While the alliance claims in the same breath that it is committed to creating the conditions for a nuclear weapons free world, it has apparently done little to identify and realize these conditions. Canada should be making common cause with Germany, The Netherlands, Norway, and other like-minded allies to ensure that the alliance actually has a nuclear policy that is credible and compatible with the NPT obligations of its members. A revitalization of NATO consultations would also address conventional arms control and the need to salvage the currently threatened achievements of the past, such as the CFE Treaty, and to reinforce others, such as the Vienna Document on confidence-building measures and the Open Skies Treaty, in which Canada had a major hand to play.
The last mission expressed in the strategic concept is cooperative security. This task also demands sustained consultation amongst allies and between NATO members and their partners. The dedicated councils with Russia and the Ukraine certainly require attention and a renewed effort to overcome the adversarial attitude that still characterizes many of their sessions. As part of a forward-looking conflict prevention strategy, we should also encourage a creative approach to devising norms for responsible state behaviour in cyber security and seek ways to forestall turning cyberspace into a new east-west battleground.
Canada has to be prepared to invest in the alliance if it still wants to benefit from the substantial security dividends it derives from the alliance. At a time when both DND and DFAIT are experiencing budgetary contractions, it's going to require creative and well-coordinated Canadian political and military actions to ensure that we are, in the end, a NATO policy shaper and not just a policy taker.
I thank you for your attention.