National Defence Committee on Feb. 27th, 2018

[VAdm (Ret'd) Robert Davidson]

Absolutely.

[Erin O'Toole, Conservative, Durham, ON]

When we lost our supply ships, did that gap in capability—a real gap as opposed to imagined fighter capability gaps—need, in your expert opinion, to be fulfilled, or was it okay for 10 years to ask other countries to provide us with replenishment at sea capability?

[VAdm (Ret'd) Robert Davidson]

As I just mentioned, I did the mission in the Arabian Sea. I took a tanker with me, and we did a six-month deployment to the Arabian Sea to do counterterrorism and counterpiracy. One of the challenges I had when I was there was that we didn't have adequate air assets to do the surveillance.

I was responsible for about two million square miles of ocean, and often I only had four ships. I needed air assets. The ally to whom I went and said, “Can you not give me some more air assets?”—and it wouldn't surprise you who that ally was—their response was, “Well, it's a pity you didn't bring any, isn't it?”, because we had not contributed to that aspect.

From that moment on I've always been of the belief that if we want to lead in missions, and do deployed missions, we have to bring many of the capabilities, the integral capabilities, with us. That's why it's very important for us not to rely on allies for key areas of capability, like combat search and rescue, attack helicopters, and tankers. We need those capabilities, and in those periods of time when we are gapped, they fundamentally limit the Canadian Armed Forces' ability to do its job.

[Erin O'Toole, Conservative, Durham, ON]

I very much agree. Thank you for your perspective.

Colonel Graham, you gave me so many great little tidbits. I loved your quote about your friend who started out an international liberal and then became conservative. It reminds me of the Disraeli quote that said—

[William C. Graham]

Don't take too much, Viktor Orbán may not want to be your model.

[Erin O'Toole, Conservative, Durham, ON]

“If you are not a liberal at 25, you have no heart. If you are not a conservative at 35 you have no brain.”

[William C. Graham]

This was much used against me in my life.

[Erin O'Toole, Conservative, Durham, ON]

You did use another quote, saying, “Never say never” with respect to policy decisions and alliances and those sorts of things. I'd like to ask you for a moment about the decision not to participate in ballistic missile defence.

Certainly, the multi-generational history we have on continental security through NORAD has us as a full partner in 95% of NORAD operations, with the exception of BMD.

Could you explain the rationale for not participating in BMD when you were in cabinet?

[William C. Graham]

Well, the rationale was very much political. There was not a lot of support for BMD. I'll be very frank, when President Bush came to Ottawa, and made a public statement saying we should get on board or else, Canadians got their backs up and any chance of us getting it through at that time was...I told President Bush at the time, when I saw him in Halifax, “Well, thanks a lot for burying me and BMD”, because I was the one who was carrying the missile flag, if you like, in the Liberal caucus, on behalf of the Prime Minister.

I totally believe we should have gone in BMD partly for the NORAD file. There was a time when they divorced ballistic missile defence from NORAD. The fact of the matter is that without participating in ballistic missile defence, we are not guaranteeing the future of NORAD as such. You can't bifurcate these two things, in my view.

What's more, the argument against ballistic missile defence is that it's going to include the Chinese and the Russians. It's going to create a more dangerous world. However, it is so limited in its scope, and is so limited in its capacity that it could only deal with a Korea. It could only deal with a rogue state. It isn't possibly going to deal with the Russian or the Chinese situation.

In my view, the strong political and geopolitical reasons against it are not valid, and we should have it as a defence in case of what is now looking like a very real possibility.

[Erin O'Toole, Conservative, Durham, ON]

Can we maintain that full partnership within NORAD as well?

[William C. Graham]

Yes, absolutely.

[The Chair, Liberal, Stephen Fuhr]

Your time is up, Mr. O'Toole.

I'm going to yield the floor to Ms. Alleslev.

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

Thank you very much.

I'd like to continue a little bit on the education. Certainly, the testimony here today, Admiral, clearly outlined the challenges and the misconceptions and misperceptions. Yet, our population may not understand the change in threat, they may be viewing us from a previous time, and believe that we continue to have a capability and do great things that we once did. I look at the Kosovo air mission, or Libya. We probably couldn't do that again today.

Parliamentarians, yes, are one thing, but even parliamentarians don't have the depth and level of expertise to be able to adequately communicate. There are many in your community who share your perspective, but we seem to talk only within the community.

How do we take those experts within the community, and get them to have conversations with the broader Canadian public, so we can educate more effectively around the threat and around why NATO is so important to Canadians and Canada in NATO, not just Europe for Europeans?

[VAdm (Ret'd) Robert Davidson]

I mentioned earlier the issue of senior military people speaking. Frankly, we just don't let them do it, unlike some of our allies. In the United States, every four-star is brought before committees, and they're all mandated to speak their own personal views to those committees. In our context, they're mandated to speak the government line when they show up at a committee, whatever the government line of the day is. We could do a lot to improve education by opening that up and allowing more dialogue and frank military advice from senior military folks about the state of affairs globally.

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

Do you mean both serving and retired?

[VAdm (Ret'd) Robert Davidson]

I'm always delighted to speak, and I'll do it any time anybody wants to listen, but that could be a trait of being an ex-admiral.

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

Would you have a perspective on the delicate balance of senior military officials being more candid at committee while they're still in uniform?

[William C. Graham]

Foreign policy, like national defence, has a greater capacity to have non-partisan, all-party support for it. When I was chairman of the foreign affairs committee, we had all-party support for every single report we produced, and there's a better opportunity for that in defence and security and foreign affairs. While I'm hearing what the admiral is saying, if I put my former defence minister hat on, I would say that if the committees—the parliamentarians—are less partisan and want to work together, that too would be an important feature.

I put it to you, Admiral, that a serving officer wouldn't want to go in and figure they were feeding something that was going to turn into a political frenzy and a debate. They want to get in and have like-minded people saying to one another, “What can we do for the good of the country?” That's what they want to do. That's what their interests are. That's what I like to believe the members of the committee want to do, so the less we can make it a partisan issue, and the more we can make it a joint issue about the security of the country, the more frankness you'll get from everybody who's participating.

[VAdm (Ret'd) Robert Davidson]

I mentioned in my opening remarks the issue of being multipartisan. Something as important as national defence needs to be developed in a multipartisan way. The only way you can do that is if you open the kimono, you bring everybody in, you share the classified and unclassified information in a multipartisan committee that can actually then come to agreement on what the right capabilities and direction of defence are for a nation. When you do that, you don't get the starts and stops. You don't get the “we like this particular airplane, or this particular helicopter, or we don't”. It doesn't become a political issue at the next election if it's been done in a multipartisan way. If we don't do that, we're never going to get down the path of comprehensive policy.

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

By the same token, is there a cost to parliamentarians and the public not being educated, and us not having a comprehensive, long-term perspective on defence?

[The Chair, Liberal, Stephen Fuhr]

Actually I'm going to have to hold it there, but we'll have extra time so we might be able to circle back on that.

Mr. Garrison will get the last formal question, and then we'll go around the track for another five minutes for each party.

Mr. Garrison.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to go back to Mr. Graham, on ballistic missile defence. You said, when we were talking about NATO's expansion to eastern Europe, that this was about protection of democracy, and that Russia simply didn't accept that so they had a different view. When you talked about ballistic missile defence, though, you said its capabilities are obviously so limited that Russia and China couldn't misunderstand that.

How do you square those two things at the same time? You just said in eastern Europe, where the objectives were clearly solidifying democracy, that Russia misunderstood that and responded. Why are they not capable of misinterpreting ballistic missile defence in the same way, as a threat to them, despite what you see as the facts?

[William C. Graham]

The facts are what missile defence can do. It can stop one or two missiles, and I'm not even convinced that the Israeli Iron Dome was as successful as they said it was. Nobody really knows. This is still at a highly developmental stage which is one of the reasons, maybe going back to the original question about why we didn't go in at the time, was that nobody was sure it was going to work. It looked like it was going to be a lot of money. It was crazy. It's not anymore. It's definitely there.

The geopolitical situation was.... We had, at our committee, a former secretary of defense of the United States come up, McNamara, and he was very definite. He said, “If you can develop a perfect missile defence, then of course you've developed the perfect aggressive weapon because the other guy can't attack you. You can attack everything.” This is why the Russians and the Chinese want to inhibit ballistic missile defence because that will then attenuate the deterrents factor of their weapon system.

Our argument is that this can never deal with 10,000 ICBMs. It can only deal with one or two, which is why it is, in my view, particularly important at this time when we're looking at something like North Korea. As a country, we've agreed in Europe on the NATO front. We've accepted this. I think the defence review did say that we'll explore with our American colleagues as NORAD goes ahead, so there's an opportunity. I'm just urging the government at this time that they should be relooking at this, that's all.

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

Isn't the further development of ballistic missile defence a step toward that fear that the Russians and Chinese have? Isn't that rational on their part to say because of further development of this system even though it may not be capable at this time of becoming that aggressive weapon, doesn't it contribute to that arms race, that attempt to build it further?

[William C. Graham]

That's quite possible but frankly I think it would be very naive to think that the Russians and the Chinese aren't themselves working on a ballistic defence missile system at this particular time. I imagine they're into this big time. We might wake up one day and discover they're the ones with the perfect ballistic missile defence, and we've been sitting here twiddling our thumbs.