National Defence Committee on Sept. 25th, 2018

[The Chair, Liberal, Stephen Fuhr]

I'll circle back with that.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

To conclude the thought that it should be in your riding...?

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

No, to finish the sentence.

[The Chair, Liberal, Stephen Fuhr]

I'm going to yield the floor to MP Gallant.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

You have stated that if Canada is to deploy to a chapter VII mandate mission, which Mali is, we'd require combat, heavy weapon support, mobile medical teams, engineering supports, civilian experts and police. That seems like an extensive list of needs for a peacekeeping mission per se.

Do our Canadian Armed Forces members in Mali have this type of support currently?

[Dr. Sarah Jane Meharg]

I can probably best answer the question by broadening our perspective on what we think peacekeeping is. Traditionally, peacekeepers were not allowed to use offensive operations. There was use of force in defence only. The remit changes when we move from a chapter VI—to a chapter 6.5, a chapter 6.75—and then a chapter VII.

I think what you're referring to is the chapter VII, which really speaks to the insecure environment in which a mission is being deployed. That emergent security environment requires the use of force, not only in order to protect the lives of the peacekeepers who are there and to uphold the mission mandate but also to protect the civilians. The two Canadian Forces representatives who were here before me would be best able to say specifically what is in Mali and what they're using when it comes to their resources.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

For a chapter VII peacekeeping mission, how would you measure whether or not such a mission has been successful? What variables are you going to look at?

[Dr. Sarah Jane Meharg]

From a social science research perspective, it's the long-term sustainability of the peace. Peace can be defined both as negative peace and positive peace, if we go back to Johan Galtung's academic perspective. I want us to take that in stride because in peace and conflict studies we look at what the tenets or hallmarks are of a peaceful society, and peacekeeping is not necessarily intended to get us right to that end state—the hallmarks of a peaceful society. It's supposed to create an environment in which peace can take hold.

Chapter VII allows for a wider remit of the use of force, so, possibly, the mission mandate will be realized sooner, instead of perhaps starting with a chapter VI, and then, every year, as that emergent insecure environment continues to become more threatening, converting over to a chapter VII.

How would we measure mission success? It all goes back to the actual mission mandate, what the UN says is successful, and matching it up with what its mission mandates were. If there are metrics to use during the mission, they're typically related to whether or not—as the other witnesses suggested—training was required, what was missing, what the gaps are, and whether or not those mission mandates were attained.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

The current conflict—we have the UN force guarding against Mali—is from two non-state actors: the MNLA rebels in Tuareg, and a force of al Qaeda in west Africa. Given that you've said that non-state actors and ungoverned spaces can create shaky ground on which to manage conflicts, in your opinion, does the UN peacekeeping mission in Mali stand a chance of ensuring lasting peace?

[Dr. Sarah Jane Meharg]

No.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

From all perspectives, from a security perspective, if we're not going to achieve that, at what point should we cut our losses and return our troops home?

[Dr. Sarah Jane Meharg]

Are you speaking from the perspective of Canada or asking if the UN mission should shut down?

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Canada.

[Dr. Sarah Jane Meharg]

The U.S. has gone through a process called “live exercise training”. About four years ago, they began deploying on missions around the world that they hadn't typically been part of—HADR operations, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations—in order to train up their people on what happens with other nationalities and cultures when they come together in order to achieve mission success.

Canada should continue to be part of UN operations in Mali in order to gain that experience. We have lost almost a decade of peacekeeping training experience in a live environment, so it would be a great way to augment the training that is already happening at places like the PSTC and any future centre of excellence that is stood up.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Our mission right now, the Medevac mission, is a little different from what the Medevac people in Afghanistan would have done, although we didn't have our own Chinooks at the time. I still don't understand the distinction that makes what's happening in Mali a peacekeeping versus a combat mission. It sounds like they're doing more of the same thing they did in Afghanistan than what they would have done in one of our more traditional two-dimensional peacekeeping missions of days of yore.

[Dr. Sarah Jane Meharg]

I don't have a specific opinion on that, but we have to return to what a UN peacekeeping mission is all about. It's to create an environment for that peace to take hold. Peacekeeping at its heart is a political intervention. Tactically the medevacs may be doing exactly what they did in a prior combat zone, so tactically sometimes those things merge. But the political reasoning and the political mandate is very different from Afghanistan.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Okay.

[The Chair, Liberal, Stephen Fuhr]

Thank you.

MP Garrison.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC]

Thanks very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you very much for being here with us again.

I want to go back to the very stark question you were asked by Ms. Gallant, and the very stark answer, and explore that a little more. I think you said some interesting things about definitions of “peace” that may give different understandings to your answer of that question.

When you were asked, “Does the Mali mission have a chance of achieving peace?”, I would ask it differently. Does it have a chance of achieving conditions where peace might take hold, or not achieving anything at all? Is that a fair way to state the question?

[Dr. Sarah Jane Meharg]

It's going to take a lot of resources and a lot of political will and the correct mechanisms injected at the right time along the spectrum of operations, based on conflict escalation and de-escalation. When I answered the question in that stark way, it's because the political aim is not matching up with the means and the ways.

In military parlance we talk about ends, ways and means, strategic thinking, where those three things are lined up. Ends are your political aim or your objective, the ways are what we would call peacekeeping in this conversation and the wider spectrum of peace operations, including diplomatic and development efforts augmenting both ends of that bump, and then we look at the means, and those are the resources we have available.

Give the political aim to the military representatives we had at the table earlier, and they'll define the resources required to meet the aim. That's what they do best. They're incredible planners so they can do that, they can execute the plan. The problem is that there's often that mismatch between the aim, the broader role that Canada wants to play in the international community, and what's happening on the ground. When those two things are mismatched, we often have people coming back from the field who say they don't understand why they couldn't make a difference, they didn't understand what they were doing, and that the rhetoric—they call it “the rhetoric”—that was provided to them in advance of deploying did not match up with the realities in the field.

I teach hundreds of Canadian officers, and I've trained people from all over the world on these subjects. When that disconnect happens, the field reality takes hold and you know that you cannot make a difference in the long-term development of a community, it's up to the community to do that themselves. We're coming at it from, again, the tip of Maslow's hierarchy. We need to manage our expectations to what these conflict mechanisms are capable of. That's why I answered no.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC]

If the Mali mission had proper resources, or perhaps somewhat of a realignment of those goals, that could create conditions for peace to take hold. Is that what you're saying? But the resources aren't matched up and the objectives aren't clearly oriented.

[Dr. Sarah Jane Meharg]

The UN has a very clear objective on what it wants to do with the Mali mission, but it's possible that we don't have a matching up of our ends, ways and means. That's what I'm referring to: our role, and what we're doing it for, and if we're going to meet the ends we want.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC]

As you said, for peace to take hold, which I think is a good way for us to think about those more complex missions, sometimes that means things like ensuring the food system or the health system restarts or the education system functions. Talking about traditional peacekeeping, I guess we've shifted somewhat to where sometimes there's an emphasis on providing additional parts to the peacekeeping mission to help make sure those needs are being met.

Do you see that happening in the Mali mission?

[Dr. Sarah Jane Meharg]

I think there are contributions that are addressing Maslow's pyramid at the bottom level, those physiological needs such as making sure that the food system is resourced and online, that the communications systems are resourced and online, that all of those bits and pieces that create a functioning society are working more cohesively. However, that's just sustaining something from an external perspective. It's not necessarily being sustained internally, and that's where we need a mission to get to. The environment and the culture need to be able to strengthen and support that on an ongoing basis for peace to take hold and be long term.

[The Chair, Liberal, Stephen Fuhr]

MP Spengemann.