Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I really appreciate this opportunity to say a few words about what I think is a very important topic. If I may, I'd like to start with a couple of basics.
Canada belongs to two strategic alliances, NORAD and NATO, and I think sometimes we forget that NATO is as much about the defence of Canada as is NORAD. It's a two-way street. It's not just Canada protecting Europe. It's Europe contributing, if necessary, to the defence of Canada. By strategic alliance I mean to say that it's a mix of diplomatic, military, and economic issues. It's not purely, I think, anyway, a military alliance. I know this is the national defence committee, but I would urge upon you the view that the alliance's political responsibilities and aims are as important as the military ones. I'd like to come back to that a little bit later.
To answer a very basic question, why a country joins a military alliance, if you go back to the Cold War it was pretty obvious. The Soviet Union was out to defeat the rest of the planet. It was equally obvious that Canada could not defend against it alone, so we joined the alliance. That is a practice this country has followed for a very long time. If we can't do something on our own, we join an alliance. We make it a multilateral effort. That is something you need to consider when you think about NATO today. You don't join an alliance just for the sheer joy of it. You join it because it's in the national interest and because it allows the country to protect itself against threats from outside the country. We're not a superpower, and recognizing that is really important.
To my mind, it's beyond reasonable debate that Canada should or should not maintain its membership in NATO. I say this because, putting aside the Soviet Union's nuclear arsenal and its desire to take over the entire world, the basis of a decision on what we do in NATO has to be the threat that Canada faces from the world today. Without going into excessive detail, I'd like to argue that the threat level we face today is at least as significant as during the Cold War. It's very different, but it's as significant as during the Cold War. What are these threats?
There are two clearly revisionist states on this planet, Russia and China. They don't like the way the world is organized, and they're constantly poking and prodding to try to increase their influence and change the balance of power on the planet.
We have a multiplicity of terrorist organizations with considerable geographic reach. It's not like the old days when you had a terrorist who only worried about his town or his province. Many terrorist organizations have a reach that extends to this continent.
There is a significant increase in the number of ungoverned spaces. You'll recall at the time of the Afghanistan conflict, it was partially because Afghanistan was an ungoverned space that we ended up with 9/11, so I think it is a real preoccupation, or should be, that we worry about the ungoverned spaces.
There are the issues with cyber, which are new and which we did not have to deal with during the Cold War. There is not just cyberwar but cyberterrorism, a really significant added complexity to the way the world has to deal with itself.
There is a significantly greater number of nuclear states. During the Cold War we basically worried about Russia, or the Soviet Union. Today there are at least a half dozen, and most of these are very unstable.
We live in a globalized world, which means that any security issue halfway around the world has the potential of affecting Canada, so retreating into a cocoon, I would argue, will not work. Most of the issues that occur around the planet affect us in one way or another.
The last threat that is considerably more significant than it was even a few years ago is the unpredictable world power balance. This is because the United States is shifting its view of what it does in the world; Europe is not what it used to be, not the powerhouse it used to be; China and Asia are changing significantly, and there is nothing like unpredictability to increase risk. So joining enthusiastically an alliance like NATO makes a lot of sense for a country like Canada.
All of these put together or individually cannot be dealt with by one state alone, and certainly not by Canada, so maintaining a relationship with NATO and enhancing it makes great sense. We have to be a full member of NATO diplomatically and militarily.
There's a lot of discussion these days about the 2% target for expenditures. I think, if we're being honest with one another, we have to admit that most states are not going to meet the 2%. They're just not going to. You gentlemen and ladies are the politicians and I am not, but I do not see our doubling our defence budget to $40 billion in order to attain our 2%.
If we're not going to do that, I think we have to demonstrate to the alliance that nevertheless we're on a steady course to slowly increase our budget. More to the point, we have to make sure that our contribution is as effective as it possibly can be.
I don't think it's likely that Russian tanks are going to be rolling westward through the plains of eastern Europe, which was the main preoccupation during the Cold War, so planning on that basis, to my mind, doesn't make a great deal of sense. We do need to have a standing military and make a contribution to NATO in that way, but I think we need to worry about the new threats that are emerging or that have emerged. Cyber is one of them. Space is another. The use of artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly of concern to the militaries around the world. As well, generally speaking, there is the issue of hybrid warfare. It's not the army, navy, and air force of the 1960s that we need for today. Fundamentally, we need to match the new threats with counter-threats, with counter-capacities. I think if we do that well, the effectiveness of our contribution will be increased.
The recent defence review pledged a significant amount of money over time to the defence portfolio. I think this is a good thing. The bad news is that most of it is dedicated to dealing with the capital deficit, and you cannot construct ships or aircraft overnight. Just opening a slight parenthesis, I think our greatest contribution to NATO would be to solve our defence procurement problems so that we could actually get things moving faster than they have been. I want to be clear that I'm not directing this to any particular government. It has been a problem for the last 25 years, if not longer. We simply haven't dealt effectively with the issue, I think, of defence procurement.
Doing that alone would enable us to have a more effective force available for other purposes, but also for NATO, sooner rather than later. All of that should occur at the same time as Canada is active diplomatically within the alliance, both to improve the effectiveness of the alliance—our treatment of Turkey, for example, over the course of the last decade or so is a good illustration of how we have not dealt as effectively as we could diplomatically with some of our NATO allies—and to deal diplomatically with the alliance, to deal with threats with the broader international community.
Let me summarize by saying I think it's the threats that we face that argue in favour of our continued and enhanced relationship with NATO. It's essential that we find the most effective way to make that contribution. It is not entirely by simply continuing what we have been doing over the last couple of decades but also by looking at new threats. If we don't do this, I think the level of threats that I talk about is going to increase, not decrease.
Thank you, Chairman. I'll stop there.