Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to the committee for inviting me.
You have a longer version of my comments that are being translated, and by the brevity of my calling—professors tend to be much more long-winded—I will try to condense them as much as possible.
My topic is North American defence, Arctic security and Russian imperial delusions. These are large interlocking topics. My purpose today is to provide context, linkages in a broad analysis, with some specifics on certain issues.
In the time permitted, the assessment cannot be comprehensive. I hope to get into more detail in the question period, but at least I want to look at some of the potential threats to Canada, and possible ways to understand, counter, or at least mitigate these.
At first blush it would seem that Canada has a very effective triple layer of protection to guarantee its interests and sovereignty. My colleague mentioned NATO. This is one layer. The second layer is NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, which creates an alliance with Washington that is meant to protect our airspace, air sovereignty, overall defence of North America. Last, we have a third layer, and that is Canada itself. We often tend to forget that Canada is a G-7 member. We have a very large economy. We have enormous potential. We can do a lot ourselves. Consequently, it would seem that there would be little reason to be alarmed about threats—and I'm not here to alarm anyone—but I think it is important to look at possibilities.
I want to start off by saying that we are not in a cold war. Despite all of the problems we are witnessing in the east, the world democracies are not facing a massive military threat from a superpower with tens of thousands of tanks and vast numbers of aircraft ready to march across Europe, or a superpower that is intent on devastating North America or North American cities in an ideologically driven war fought for the purpose of imposing some universalistic doctrine.
I'm not going to look at all of the threats; I'm only going to look at some of them. But I think we also have to understand that we cannot simply delink what is happening in the east from our concerns in North America. What is happening in Ukraine, Russian actions there, does affect Canadian security. It has implications for North American defence, for Arctic security, as well as Canadian sovereignty.
I will start on the first section by looking at Russian ambitions and how they impact us in Canada.
Since Mr. Putin returned to the presidency in 2012, but particularly in the past year, Russian claims to the Arctic have multiplied. At one level this ties in with Mr. Putin's strenuous efforts to build up Russia's military might—there are enormous increases in the defence expenditures of Russia—but it also reflects a larger Putinite view of the world as well as the Kremlin's domestic political considerations. We saw that already in 2007 the Russians made a kind of quixotic gesture. They planted a little platinum flag on the floor of the sea. It's a sort of 16th century-style claim that has no validity in international law. But there have been more concrete steps since then.
We know that Mr. Putin made a statement recently, in which he instructed his military to pay strong attention to the Arctic, and declared that “every lever for the protection of Russia's security and national interests must be ensured.” Further, the Kremlin has begun to rapidly reopen and strengthen old military bases in the Arctic, and in the fall of 2013 Mr. Putin ordered the creation of a new strategic military command in the Arctic that is to be in place by the end of 2014.
It is worth noting that the Arctic, which has a very fragile and difficult ecosystem, is generally believed to contain as much as perhaps one-quarter of the world's undiscovered energy resources. Russia has been far ahead of the members of the Arctic Council in trying to explore these resources already. A recent study by the Council on Foreign Relations in New York showed that of the nearly 60 large oil and natural gas fields discovered in the Arctic, 43 out of the 60 are in Russia, 11 are in Canada, six are in Alaska, and one is in Norway. In a sense, given the extreme dependence of Russia on energy, on energy exports, the Russian military buildup ties in with that larger policy. Mr. Putin is playing that military card in multiple ways as part of a larger policy game, but it is also part of a larger imperial delusion that Russia is undergoing.
Let me state unequivocally that Russia today is definitely not a superpower, with the sole exception of nuclear weapons, and it is highly unlikely that Russian will ever be a superpower. It has a GDP that, in nominal terms, is only that of Italy's and just slightly larger than Canada's. On a per capita basis, Russian GDP is that of Barbados.
Further, Russia has enormous demographic problems: a population of 143 million, ethnic issues in the Caucasus. It's plagued by a stagnant unidimensional economy. It is in desperate need of fundamental structural reform if it is to be competitive in a modern international system. It is heavily dependent on energy and weapon sales. Particularly in the case of energy, they are doing everything possible to try to extract more hydrocarbons, which are very heavily pollutant.
Mr. Putin has a choice of trying to build a modern state or trying to build a greater Russia, an imperial Russia. He seems to have opted for the latter, and that affects his world view. Within Russia itself, there is a kind of combination of what I have called in several of my scholarly writings—