National Defence Committee on April 19th, 2016

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

All right. Dead is dead. I just wanted to clarify.

The other point he makes in the article is that there are only 34 interceptors. Is that correct?

[LGen Pierre St-Amand]

It's in the ballpark.

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

It's in the ballpark.

Forgetting Iran and Russia, possibly China, we have 34 possible interceptors.

[LGen Pierre St-Amand]

But it is the system. The Americans will tell you that it is designed for a missile from North Korea or Iran; it's not designed for a country like China or Russia. It is a limited system to control those rogue states that might launch one or two and still cause vast devastation to our population centres.

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

So it's really a system designed for rogue states rather than a system designed for peer-to-peer war.

[LGen Pierre St-Amand]

Absolutely.

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

That's not something I've understood before.

I wanted you to talk a bit about the new maritime domain awareness issue. With global warming, the opening up of the north, the “northern approaches”, shall we say, I've been told that the real worry is that some ship going up into the north might be able to launch missiles. This brings, in effect, the border much closer to Canadian, and thus North American concerns. Could you speak about that, as to the emergence, if you will, of this possibility?

[LGen Pierre St-Amand]

In the context of NORAD, we've always looked north and we look at the Arctic as being an avenue of approach as opposed to a base of operation. We operate from the Arctic to do our job, but it's an avenue of approach for us. In the maritime domain, we have this mission, which is maritime warning, in which case we would know about a scenario like you just described, if we have the proper detection and the proper intelligence. We would get the information and therefore advise both governments of a threat in the north. But our role would be limited to that.

In that case, our role is simply to advise of something that will be coming in, but if that ship were undetected, of course, were to end up in the Northwest Passage or in our Arctic and was able to launch a cruise missile, that cruise missile would then become our problem. It's a NORAD problem because it is an air-breathing threat . So that would characterize the way NORAD would be concerned with the north.

Here is another aspect of the north. While our Arctic, our maritime approaches, say, close to 12 nautical miles north of our land mass, may or may not be melting, depending on which side of the argument you find yourself on, you have to look on the other side. The Russian northern maritime lines of communications are melting way faster, and for us that is a concern, because they could position capabilities there. They could put stuff there that could act as a deterrent, and when you have a deterrent that could affect North America, we take notice. Now it starts to affect our freedom of execution, freedom of manoeuvre, and so forth. That's why I say, from a NORAD perspective, our area of interest is global. We look further than our borders, and we really look far north in this case.

I'm not sure I answered the question, but that's the limit of our operation—

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

That's about as far as you can go.

[LGen Pierre St-Amand]

That's the other question.

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

Do I have any more time?

[The Chair, Liberal, Stephen Fuhr]

No, that's your time.

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

Okay, well, that was three months worth of questions right there.

[The Chair, Liberal, Stephen Fuhr]

I'd like to give the floor to Ms. Gallant. You have five minutes.

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

Further to what Mr. Rioux was talking about and the cyber-attacks on dams, we know that a number of cyber-attacks have occurred and that so far they've been mitigated. However, I can think of at least one military base that is just a little bit downriver from a major dam in Canada. I'm not sure about any NORAD installations, but the point he made does speak to the necessity to have more of a cyber component situational awareness present at NORAD.

You mentioned the South China Sea and how that is becoming an increasing area of concern for NORAD. Now, prior to Putin's invasion of Crimea, the United States was pivoting toward the Pacific, which had Europe all worried. What measures does Canada need to take in terms of infrastructure or equipment to address this emerging concern over a possible threat from that region?

[LGen Pierre St-Amand]

I'm afraid that's out of my lane, Madam. With respect to NORAD, what we are doing is watching and thinking about the implications for North America of something bad happening in that area. On the rest, I'm not really qualified to provide an opinion or an answer.

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

Okay. You did raise the issue of the threat from that area, so what is the threat? Is there a concern that there will be incoming missiles?

[LGen Pierre St-Amand]

Think of a scenario where the behaviour of a state is causing the U.S. to react, and all of a sudden we have something going on here. We have to think about these things. In an extreme scenario where it could go to [Inaudible--Editor] in that area, it is not unlikely that North America could be targeted as a way to deflect or to de-escalate something that's going on somewhere else in the world. That's what I mean by the fact that we are interested, we are monitoring, and we are thinking about scenarios that may in fact impact the security of North America, just because of activity that might happen in this area.

I'm not sure if I'm clear. It's a very indirect thing. It's soft. It is unlikely. It is to the right of arc in the scenarios, but it does cross our minds.

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

Okay, so it's not a matter of there being a direct threat to North America or the United States, recognizing, as you had said before, that even a hit on the United States would have reverberations in Canada, as we saw after 9/11. We saw the stock market go down, and the lack of certainty caused jobs to be lost. When your economy takes a hit, eventually security takes a hit as well, because defence seems to be the first thing governments like to go after when they're trying to balance budgets.

In terms of the ballistic missiles and the cruise missiles, you mentioned there's no direct threat to Canada. I think Mr. Fisher asked the question about sovereignty. I'd like to look at the flip side of that, because Mr. McKay aptly pointed out that there's a screen that Canadians aren't allowed to look at, and that's the BMD screen. Mr. Fisher contends that if we're a part of BMD, then perhaps we'd lose a sense of our sovereignty. If there is something incoming over Canadian territory and the Canadian representative at NORAD is not allowed to know about this, we don't have input about what happens in our airspace.

Would you clarify this from your military perspective. Is sovereignty an issue one way or the other?

[LGen Pierre St-Amand]

For the ballistic missile threat, it will fly through space as opposed to airspace, and there's a big difference. If the impact point is close enough to the Canadian border, there may be some portion that is within our airspace, so to speak. It is a space trajectory. From that perspective, I'm not aware of sovereignty issues for space vehicles. That takes care of that one.

I forget the second part of your question.

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

That was mainly the question.

What does Canada need to do to have the detection and surveillance in place to safeguard against cruise missiles and ballistic missiles? What do we need to do? Give us a shopping list.

[LGen Pierre St-Amand]

A shopping list would be sensors and a means to track, detect, and engage a cruise missile. If we had a shopping list and unlimited resources, that also means point-defences, for example with a ground-based defence system that would protect our most important sites within the Canadian land mass, which we don't have now. From a ground-based or defence point of view, this is something we don't have. That might be the biggest difference from the configuration we currently have.

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

Okay, from—

[The Chair, Liberal, Stephen Fuhr]

I'm going to cut you off there. That's six minutes. I've been a little generous with the time.

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

Thank you.