National Defence Committee on Feb. 27th, 2018

[The Chair, Liberal, Stephen Fuhr]

Thank you, and to help me moderate, if anyone sees this, this is a sign of 30 seconds left. It's not a hard stop. It's asking you to wrap it up in 30 seconds or less for a graceful dismount.

Mr. Garrison, you have the floor.

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

Thank you to both our witnesses for being here today. We've had the privilege of having some very distinguished and experienced panels, and this is one whose expertise I really value.

I'm one of the voices that has been asking about the other end of nuclear defence, and that's nuclear reductions. I think we're in a climate where the situation has changed. With the U.S. nuclear posture review recently, which contemplates first use of nuclear weapons, we have the development and employment of tactical nuclear weapons.

My question for both of you is whether you believe that it would be possible for Canada to exercise a role in NATO that would turn NATO's attention toward its commitment to creating conditions for a world free of nuclear weapons. I understand there's a debate about ballistic missile defence, but I want to look at the other end of that. How do we get NATO moving, and can we get NATO moving, on creating those conditions? It is officially committed to this, but doesn't seem to be doing very much about it.

[VAdm (Ret'd) Robert Davidson]

It's a great question, but you know, I'm not sure that trying to move in that direction is a role that we would want to take on as a nation in the current environment.

Quite frankly, as abhorrent as nuclear weapons are, their presence has undoubtedly contributed to global security, and for nations that don't have them, that contribution is what they see and why they want them. There's a reason why Korea wants nuclear weapons. There's a reason why Iran would probably like to have them in the fullness of time, because they are an insurance against unwanted attack.

I would love to see the world without them, but I don't see that it is anywhere likely to be something we have in the short term, so why take that on?

[William C. Graham]

You might want to have a look at the House of Commons committee report on NATO and nuclear weapons. We did a report on denuclearization when I was chairman and Lloyd Axworthy was minister. We ran into a lot of problems over that report. This is a very tricky issue when it comes to quite a number of our allies, largely our American ally.

Canada has been a strong proponent of denuclearization. I will have to say that, when I was minister, that was a file in Geneva that went around and around and around and never went anywhere for the reasons, I think, that the admiral has pointed out. I personally am quite concerned that we are going the other way at the moment. We were saying at this nuclear conference I was at involving Korea, the Korea conference yesterday. You look at the Korean issue in the context of non-proliferation as a whole. Look at India, Pakistan, Israel, the Iranian experience, etc. I would think that this is very difficult for us to achieve. I'm not saying we stop working on it, but I would say that it's very tough.

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

Do you think NATO's an arena in which we could start working on this?

[William C. Graham]

In my time it was about the no first use doctrine; that was the whole debate. Frankly, I just don't know enough about the present nuclear thinking. A lot of think tanks and others are really puzzling about the best posture on this. I don't have anything to offer.

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

I think it only hurts our ability to move forward in other agenda areas at NATO if we use that as a central theme.

Returning to a couple of things that Ms. Gallant asked about where, despite our political differences we sometimes agree, and that's both the size of our navy and the maintenance of a submarine capacity. You made a comment, Admiral Davidson, about the budget. It's been a concern of mine that while numbers are written on paper that the actual amounts being delivered to the Canadian Forces for capital expenditure are shoved so far down the road that we risk losing capabilities in the interim.

Is that in accord with your thinking or do you think we've already lost them?

[VAdm (Ret'd) Robert Davidson]

Absolutely.

We are future loading so much of our defence capability that I believe a lot of it is at risk of being maintained. It's very much a problem.

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

Do you see that as a problem with the shipbuilding strategy that we've adopted and that it's underfunded for what we need? I talked about it when it was adopted as a floor and now it's become a ceiling.

[VAdm (Ret'd) Robert Davidson]

The real strength of the shipbuilding strategy would have been, in my view, to get us down the path of continuous shipbuilding. You get industry started and then you get into producing flights of ships and you continuously build ships. Much of the analysis today would say that it's actually cheaper in the long run to run your navy that way than it is to do expensive refits. Refitting older vessels to put capability in them is always a very expensive business.

The whole idea behind a shipbuilding strategy was to get us down the path of continuous shipbuilding. That should allow us to do cyclical batch-building, if you will. Trying to reduce the time between starting a project and getting into it allows us to do better budgeting as well. What's killing us at the moment is that the navy puts forward a proposal on how much it's going to cost to build ships, and it's a decade later before we even get close to going to contract because it's taking us a ridiculous amount of time to move forward on these projects. By then, the initial estimates are completely lost in the wash and then we're blamed for not having good estimates. We need to tighten that up enormously.

[William C. Graham]

I totally agree with you. When we were looking at this the last time the difference for the surface ships was $10 billion or $12 billion or something like that in the budget process. We knew that at the time it was going to be closer to $40 billion or $50 billion. That is a real problem that I think everybody recognizes, although I think the department is doing a better job of trying to tighten them up. Where are we with double-hulled ships for the Arctic? In my view double-hulled—

[The Chair, Liberal, Stephen Fuhr]

I'm going to have to cut it off there. I'm sorry.

We'll have time to go back or somebody else might pick up on it.

I'm going to have to yield the floor to Mr. Spengemann.

[Sven Spengemann, Liberal, Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON]

Gentlemen, thank you both for being here. Thank you for your distinguished records of service to our nation.

Mr. Graham, thank you very much for broaching the question of the political component of NATO. I think it's a privilege for us to have you here having served in both roles as the foreign minister and defence minister.

I want to take you back to 2003 and the decision by Canada not to participate in the Iraq coalition, which I think from my perspective and that of so many Canadians was spot on. It was the Canadian answer to that challenge—and in fact a decision that I personally benefited from when I served in Baghdad as a civilian UN official when people knew I was from Canada. I was widely known among the Iraqi population that Canada had chosen not to be part of this particular coalition.

My question is around coalitions of the willing, or coalitions of the geopolitically incentivized, versus NATO, versus the UN, and this constellation of circles within circles, or circles next to other circles that are active in various components of conflict resolution and peacekeeping. In fact, NATO was active and Baghdad has had, and still has, a training mission for the Iraqi officer corps located in the green zone. Also, the UN was present but very oddly there with the consent of the Iraqi government so Iraq could pull the plug on the UN presence at any time. There wasn't a chapter VII in the resolution in the sense of imposed UN presence.

What are your views on the evolution of these different ways of conducting peacekeeping, and what are the complexities of using coalitions versus using NATO or the UN?

[William C. Graham]

At that time, there was a lot of tension around the NATO table—certainly at the Prague meeting.

The Americans were very anxious to get support for the Iraq mission, and there was a lot of resistance from various countries, Canada and others, about what the NATO statement would say. There were a lot of fights. I was constantly fighting with Colin Powell about a word here, or a word there, that was going to take you in one direction or another. The Germans, as you'll recall, fought an election on this issue, and Joschka Fischer was adamant. So there was a lot of tension.

I don't think it interfered with military operations, but it certainly interfered with the idea of the Americans bringing us in.

For a long time, in Canada, we were very resistant to the idea of NATO doing training in Iraq. We saw that as a way of being involved in Iraq that we didn't want NATO to be doing, and we didn't even want our Canadian officers in NATO itself at Brussels to be deployed to Iraq. It was rather ironic, considering that we did have people in Iraq anyway, as you know, so there was a lot of confusion around these issues.

On the broader question of coalitions of the willing and when you use them and when you don't, obviously in Iraq we took the strong position that a United Nations Security Council resolution was necessary to justify it. You could take that from a legal point of view. I used to argue that it was also political, because if you couldn't get around that issue, then you wouldn't be able to demonstrate the threat of weapons of mass destruction, which Hans Blix said really weren't there.

There was a whole host of issues around that, but I don't think you can foreclose the idea that in other circumstances, what I call a Kosovo-type circumstance or other, we might be engaged in things. Because people think Afghanistan was a NATO mission, I remind everybody that it was a United Nations authorized activity. We have to remember that. We had the Security Council authority to be in Afghanistan and have always had that.

My first argument would be in favour of the Security Council, but I think we couldn't possibly rule out the circumstances, particularly given Russian and Chinese attitudes today, of a mission where that wouldn't be used.

[Sven Spengemann, Liberal, Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON]

Thanks very much for that.

I want to take the remainder of my time to give you an opportunity to comment on something you raised in your opening remarks. You spoke along the lines of cracks in the values or unity of values around NATO.

If you take your comment just now and bring it into the current context of the Middle East and the Syria crisis, what comments do you have on the unity around the values that NATO was built on and the operational concerns that the Middle East in 2018, not 2003, still raises or carries?

[William C. Graham]

When I look at Turkish troops and American-backed Kurdish troops virtually shooting at each other, and various allies supporting the Assad regime, which most of us would agree is despicable, it's a threat to our ability to work on these issues. It's a good example of the fact that if you get into something such as the Middle East where there are so many different players with so many different agendas, you're going to get pulled one way or another.

The fact that the Russians went in and took advantage of a vacuum that was created and are now there has created a whole new dynamic.

I read a lot of Middle Eastern stuff from Haaretz. It's maybe not the newspaper of choice of a lot of people, but believe you me, there's a lot of information that is quite extraordinary going on, the complexity of trying to sort out that mess.

[Sven Spengemann, Liberal, Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON]

Admiral Davidson, could I get your views on the same question?

[VAdm (Ret'd) Robert Davidson]

Yes. I'll be very quick.

We need to remember that NATO wasn't started as an organization to do deployed operations, so there are widely divergent views within the alliance on what the nature of NATO operations really ought to be. There has been an enormous amount of reluctance on the part of certain nations to do the deployed side of the house.

Most of our eastern European allies in particular want to focus NATO more on the defence of Europe than anything else, often forgetting that the western border of NATO is somewhere in, probably, Hawaii or Guam. NATO itself has difficulty coming to an agreement on what's right and what's wrong in terms of operations that are optional.

Equally, the UN Security Council, in my view, is only effective in those narrow circumstances where there are no national interests of the “Big Five”. Consequently, it's largely ineffective. Therefore, in many of those circumstances, coalitions of the willing are the only way to move forward.

[Sven Spengemann, Liberal, Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON]

Thank you both.

[The Chair, Liberal, Stephen Fuhr]

Thank you.

We're going to move to five-minute questions. Ms. Alleslev, you have the floor.

[Leona Alleslev, Liberal, Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill, ON]

Thank you very much. What a fabulous intervention and how incredibly important it is for you to share it with us today.

I'd like to leap off from where my colleague was, in terms of some cracks in the shared values. We mentioned some of the countries, but we have a very stringent ascension process to NATO, and we've never had a conversation about what happens when a NATO ally no longer shares the political values, ideals, and approach.

I'd like to hear both of your perspectives. When is the time to start having that conversation? If it is an alliance—that one for all and all for one—based on shared values, ideals, and perspectives, how do we address when we no longer share, and are no longer allied in, that fundamental perspective?

[William C. Graham]

As a political principle, I would certainly subscribe to the one that says, “never say never.” That's because circumstances change and people say, “Oh, I said never, but that was different.” I wouldn't say never, but I wouldn't encourage that type of conversation either, because I think that the alliance has to be strong enough to maintain and work to try to support democracy and democratic institutions within it. I knew Viktor Orbán very well. He was a member of Liberal International when I was a member. Viktor Orbán then said, “Liberals aren't going to go anywhere in the world. I'm going off to the right, so you guys take heart.” He went from being a young man who was extremely liberal, democratic, and dynamic to where he is today, so politics changes.

I think we have to continue working with Hungary. I would be more worried about Turkey than.... I am very worried about what's happening—

[Leona Alleslev, Liberal, Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill, ON]

Should we not start to have a conversation before we're singling out a specific nation?

[William C. Graham]

That's what I say, but where would those conversations take place? How would they take place and with whom? That's why—

[Leona Alleslev, Liberal, Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill, ON]

That's my question.