National Defence Committee on Feb. 27th, 2018

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

I guess the thumbs I'd like to twiddle are the design thumbs.

[William C. Graham]

I appreciate that. I'm not in favour of an arms race. I do think this is discrete enough at this particular time with an actual threat that we can see in the Korean issue. It is one that we should be conscious of. That's what I would urge you to consider.

[The Chair, Liberal, Stephen Fuhr]

That ends our formal questioning.

However, we do have some time remaining. I'd like to go five minutes for each party, and I'll start off with the Liberals with Ms. Romanado. You have the floor.

[Sherry Romanado, Liberal, Longueuil—Charles-LeMoyne, QC]

Thank you very much.

I wanted to talk a bit about procurement because it's the elephant in the room that we all hear about. As you know, Mr. Graham, you were on defence policy review. Essentially we hadn't done a situational analysis of the Canadian Armed Forces and our capabilities in a long time—about 20 years—which we did conduct the first year.

Vice-Admiral, you've mentioned it previously that often what happens is experts who are saying, “Okay, we need X, Y and Z.” We're talking about capital projects here. We know that these take a long time, maybe too long in terms of getting that statement of requirement, the RFP, the actual procurement, the operations, the training, everything that goes along with it. We're talking multi-year projects. We talked a bit about the multi-partisan aspect of it. Given the fact that we are running essentially governments at the same time that we're doing procurement that's going to take more than four years, more than one mandate, we have that policy lurch when we have changes in governments.

We know we're in the situation that we're in because successive governments have not invested adequately in the Canadian Armed Forces. We are in the situation we are regarding replenishment at sea because procurement wasn't done. We know that the F-18s should have been replaced years ago.

What is your recommendation given the fact that we know that this takes a very long time for some reason here in Canada to get military procurement. I've talked to many Canadian Armed Forces members. I'm Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Veterans Affairs and Associate Minister of National Defence. I hear about boots, rucksacks, right down to....

What are your recommendations? This is something that has been occurring over many decades. What would be your recommendation now that we have strong, secure and engaged...? We have forecasted for the next 20 years, procurement and sustainable funding for the Canadian Armed Forces. Is this going to be able to finally solve the problem?

[William C. Graham]

I'm sorry, I can't give you a magic bullet on the procurement thing. It's the weakest link in the chain of the whole of our defence posture, because as the admiral has said, if we don't have the equipment, we don't have the capacity to deliver anything.

When we were doing the review, I don't know if you've spoken to Admiral Murray, but he heads up a committee and he's pretty strong on saying that the procurement on the average side has been much improved and much streamlined.

As you said, Ms. Romanado, it is the large capital projects that seem to be both political in nature and take these long periods of time. I don't think there's any way you can wring the politics out of it. That's in the nature of politics, but once these commitments are made, to get to the admiral's point....

I was astonished to find out when we came in that the surface ships, which in the budget were some $12 billion, were multiples of that when I asked Vice-Admiral Norman, the chief of the navy at the time. Then I asked some of my political friends, and they said, “See, we've been sandbagged by this mad process of the previous government.” It wasn't a sandbag at all; it was just the way the system works. Somebody has to be better. I'm not the expert in that, but the system has to be dealt with. It also goes back to our bipartisan things. If we say we're going to need surface ships, we have to get everybody on green, that yes, we're sticking with the surface ships and they're going to be built, and not disagree if there is something that isn't going to be built in Canada.

You have no idea of the problems I had when I was defence minister to replace the “Herc” fleet, which was falling apart in the sky, with “J Hercs”. We ran into all these problems, because it was a single purchase and there was only one manufacturer making the plane, the J Hercs. I kept saying in cabinet meetings, “What is the problem here? There's one manufacturer, one plane. We have to replace this. Why don't we just go and buy it?” It still took four years. Even with the simple ones sometimes, it seems to be difficult.

I'm sure you've heard General Hillier. He wanted to go down and get a big ship from the Americans. They would have given us a large ship for purposes, and we couldn't do that.

I'm just sounding frustrated here.

[Sherry Romanado, Liberal, Longueuil—Charles-LeMoyne, QC]

Vice-Admiral—

[The Chair, Liberal, Stephen Fuhr]

We don't get the procurement thing right often, but the C-17 is probably a great example of us getting it right occasionally. We got that aircraft pretty quickly and we got it manned and out the door.

I'm going to give the floor to Ms. Gallant.

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

Okay. I'm going to share my time with Mr. O'Toole.

Admiral Davidson, NORAD now includes a naval component. With respect to BMD, given that a sea-launched ballistic missile within North American coastal waters is a concern, and that is of course within NATO territory, from a naval perspective, how important is it that Canada participates in BMD?

[VAdm (Ret'd) Robert Davidson]

It's very important that Canada participates. Just to go back to the debate about it, why did we decide not to do it then? Well, maybe there were still good political reasons to move forward, but the threat wasn't clear and the technology to shoot down wasn't really clear, so that's understandable.

Both of those things have changed. Now we have a clear threat and now the technology is proven. In fact, the best platform to put it in is a ship, because if you put it in a ship, ships have volumetric radar capabilities. We could put that into the new ships and we would then kill two birds with one stone, because we would then have a deployable ballistic missile defence capability that could go around the world. The capability is absolutely there, and it just mystifies me why it's not an essential element of our next class of ships—and it isn't.

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

Thank you.

I'm going to follow up the line of questioning by the parliamentary secretary. Certainly, as a former Sea King navigator, no one knows procurement problems perhaps better than I do. The period of time she talked about, the generational periods that are required for procurement, leads to the absurd situation where Pierre Trudeau's F-18 is replaced by his son with used Australian F-18s. Our participation in the joint strike fighter was started under the Chrétien government, but it's now unclear whether we're going to be a participatory country in the F-35. The maritime helicopter procurement program, the Sea King replacements, started under Pierre Trudeau and was cancelled by Chrétien.

I like the comments about bipartisanship, but how do you suggest we do that? It gets caught in election cycles, and naive, I would suggest, promises by leaders of, I won't say what party, set back 15 years of procurement work. Do you recommend approaches where the Australians seem to get it right? Do you recommend a specialized secretariat? I would be open to any suggestions, because I agree that we have to take the politics out.

[VAdm (Ret'd) Robert Davidson]

One of the big problems we have with procurement is the budget. The Parliamentary Budget Office has a concept for how to figure out what things cost that includes the full life-cycle costs, incorporating personnel costs and the replacement part costs, and so Canadians are then presented with costs that seems absolutely astronomical. You need a ship. The decision is you're going to buy ship A or ship B. We should tell them what the ships cost, and not us the ridiculous through-life cost of the whole thing. That's one aspect.

The other aspect is there is a reason, and I understand why procurement is political. It's about jobs and jobs are votes, so it is fundamentally a political thing, but we fail to demonstrate to Canadians which costs are associated with job creation and which are associated with buying military capability.

I don't mind if we're going to spend twice as much as our allies to buy a ship if our purpose is to build a shipbuilding industry in this country and create jobs, but don't put that extra 50% under the defence budget. Put it under industry and development or something else that demonstrates to Canadians that this money is being spent on job creation, not on buying ships.

[William C. Graham]

To follow your political point, Admiral, when I went down to look at the Irving shipyard and saw the coastal yard, I thought it was amazing. They are looking almost like the Hyundai yard, which I saw in Korea. It is very modern. I'm sure they will be capable of doing surface ships when the time comes, and the thing about it that I think Canadians don't understand—and they showed me the graphs of the x billions—is that more money is being spent in Ontario on that ship than in Halifax, but nobody in Ontario knows that. No Canadian voters in Oshawa realize they have as big a stake in building that ship in Halifax as the Haligonians do. They all think this is some big boondoggle for east coast shipping. It's not.

These defence contracts are a supply chain that is spread evenly right across the country now, and there's very little public knowledge of that.

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

Thank you for mentioning Oshawa. That's in my riding. You pulled that out of thin air.

[William C. Graham]

That's very good. There are a lot of benefits there.

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

I appreciate that.

Absolutely, this is part of the public education that Ms. Alleslev mentioned, which is that there is an industrial regional benefit component, an ITB, what have you, to defence that's not located just where the shipyard is, particularly with IP and IT.

Certainly I think your perspective on this, both of you, and particularly you, as a former Minister of National Defence, would be helpful because I agree that the life-cycle cost is what held up the F-35 sign-on in the previous government after the PBO released its report. It was hard to take out the cost of air crew, the cost of fuel for 40 years.

Do Canadians think of those costs when they buy their cars from the car lot? No, they don't.

[The Chair, Liberal, Stephen Fuhr]

We're going to have to leave it there. You're quite a bit over your time.

I'm going to give the last question to Mr. Garrison.

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

Thanks very much.

I may have stated earlier that I'd like to see NATO stop twiddling its thumbs on disarmament.

Admiral Davidson, you said, I believe, that if Canada tried to take a role in promoting disarmament within NATO it might affect our ability to achieve our other objectives in NATO, and that is what's really critical to our study. Could you tell me what you think our priority objectives in NATO should be at this time?

[VAdm (Ret'd) Robert Davidson]

Let me try to connect this to another question on PESCO. The alliance has been a cornerstone of our national security for decades, and the continuation of the alliance should be and remain our number one priority. I mentioned that the alliance is a bit of a buffet, so we need to understand and accept that the alliance will mean different things to different nations. In that respect, the alliance's support for nuclear capability is fundamentally important to two of our alliance members, for sure.

We're also looking at an environment right now where many of our European allies are beginning to worry about the alliance. Some of the statements that are being made by President Trump aren't particularly helpful at this time. There's a big role for us to play, I think, in being a broker and continuing to bring the various elements of the alliance together. We've always been very effective at being a broker within the alliance and bringing disparate views together at the table.

I'll come back to my earliest point, which is that our voice and ability to even do that and be a broker is fundamentally based upon our contributions and our demonstrated commitment to the alliance. When we waffle about how committed we really are, when we pull out of NATO missions that are still ongoing, and have no troops involved in them at all, we send exactly the wrong signals. Then we go ahead and send the right signal. As Kerry Buck would tell you, we did so when we sent folks to Latvia. I was fundamentally involved in that decision-making process.

We keep doing this roller-coaster ride in the alliance, and we would be much more effective in the alliance as a broker in bringing it together if we had a straight path that didn't have the peaks and troughs in it.

[The Chair, Liberal, Stephen Fuhr]

Gentlemen, I think we're going to hear the bells here very shortly. We're very much out of time.

I want to thank both of you for your many years of service to Canada and for your appearance here today in front of committee. Your perspectives are valuable to us, and they will add value to our report. Thank you for coming.

The meeting is adjourned.