National Defence Committee on March 29th, 2018

[The Chair, Liberal, Stephen Fuhr]

That's pretty much your time then, unless you can squeeze out a question and an answer in three seconds.

[David Yurdiga, Conservative, Fort McMurray—Cold Lake, AB]

You can give up my three seconds.

[The Chair, Liberal, Stephen Fuhr]

MP Alleslev.

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

Thank you very much.

I would like to take your comments a bit further, Madeleine, on how we can ensure that we're communicating with our society. This study is about why Canada matters to NATO, and why NATO matters to Canada. Of course, as parliamentarians, we need to go back to our ridings and have these conversations. I hope an occasion will arise at some point when you will be able to speak to Canadians in a constituency. From a U.K. perspective, and of course as a founding member of NATO, how would you communicate why it should matter to Canada, and why it does matter or should matter to NATO that Canada is a member?

[Madeleine Moon]

There are so many places this can go. I am thinking about this in terms of an earlier question. You start with your borders. Where am I in the world? What are the boundaries around my country? Who are the neighbours? Then you move on to consider, what are the threats out there in the wider world and how might they come to our borders? What are the defences we have to protect ourselves with?

You can say such things as part of what we call the “Little Britain” view, but then you have to say, well, who do we need to be our friends? Who will stand by us? Britain's history stretches a long way back, and I think the Falklands was the one time we fought alone. Perhaps Jamie can think of another example. The rest of our history has been fought as part of alliances. In today's world it is very hard to stand alone. You have to stand not just with people who will fight with you as a country, but also those who share your values, who won't actually hollow-out your society by weakening those values with compromises, by allowing chemical weapons, for example, by seeing the mass rounding up of women and use of them as sex slaves. That's the sort of world you want to be allied to and working with.

We also have to explain to our populations that this world hasn't gone away. It didn't end in 1945. The world is still very dangerous. Some of the dangers are new and different, but the need for us to be resilient and ever-vigilant is still there, and no matter where you are in the world the risks are out there.

Canada faces two ways. You face into the Pacific and you face into the Atlantic. Now you're also facing into that opening up of new terrain of the Arctic. Boy, are you in dangerous waters. I hope your people will then understand why NATO is as important to you as it is to the little islands off the coast of Europe that are Great Britain.

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

Well, thank you very much. To take it to the next step, can you give us a take on the fact that not all points in history are equal. Would you say that we're at a point where the temperature is rising, staying the same, or going down?

[Madeleine Moon]

I would definitely say it's rising, and I would say it's been rising for a while. I've been attacked for some time as being a Cold War warrior who is wanting to take us back in time. However, I think we have turned a blind eye for a long time to the risks that are are coming our way. I think Jamie is right: the The decisions that we've made over these chemical weapons, in particular, have allowed problems to grow. We have to wake up and stop being as complacent as we'd like to be about our security and the defence alliances that we're in, and also tell our populations that the world is a more dangerous place and they're heading towards us—

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

As your Sir Richard Barrons says, we need to see the world as it is, not as we would hope it to be.

[Madeleine Moon]

Indeed.

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

Mr. Shea, I would ask you to expand just a bit more on your commentary around international law, and perhaps the gaps in the cyber domain there. What do we need to do domestically in that area?

[The Chair, Liberal, Stephen Fuhr]

Unfortunately, I'm going to have to yield the floor to MP Garrison, for the last formal question.

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

Okay.

Thank you very much.

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

I'm going to ask a question of Mr. Shea. I will be in touch with him off-line about a particularly jarring remark in his opening presentation; I don't want to focus on that now.

You mentioned the concept of red lines for things like chemical weapons, and you talked about a role for Canada in advancing some norms on arms control.

Could you say a bit more about both the role of NATO in establishing some red lines with the new nuclear threats that we have with tactical weapons, and the idea of NATO pursuing some more activity in the area of arms control?

[Dr. Jamie Shea]

First of all, on the jarring remarks, forgive me—there was nothing intended to be jarring, but I'd be happy to address those off-line, sir.

Secondly, when we look at some of the new challenges—and we've spoken a lot today about cyber, but the Salisbury attack also shows that chemical weapons are still being used—we can certainly look at what we could do in the alliance, working together to increase our national resilience in dealing with chemical weapons if they should ever be used again.

There's clearly a need, for example, to be able to detect the type of weapon very early on, analyze exactly what it's all about, and therefore share the expertise among NATO laboratories. As you saw with polonium-210 when it was used in London in 2006, it can spread all around the place to a number of different sites, so tracking methodology is particularly important for protecting our civil populations. Of course, training intervention forces and those types of things would be important. Looking at medicine and so on—at what could be effective—is an area that we sort of gave up on after the Cold War, for obvious reasons. Certainly, one good example is to try to use NATO to regenerate certain core competencies, both at the national level and the NATO level.

In the nuclear and cyber realms there's also a lot of good work to be done. You'll remember the nuclear safety initiative that President Obama begun to track these materials around. Again, chemical weapons were smuggled over borders. That's clear, otherwise they could not have been used in London, so how can we work together on effective ways of identifying these things when they cross borders, including the intelligence-sharing piece as well, and working with countries and partners to ensure that they keep these things—when they have them—under safe lock and key?

In the cyber area, there are the CSBMs, How can we have international agreements that prevent cyber attacks against critical infrastructure like hospitals, power grids, and the things that our populations can depend upon? The U.S. and China, for example, have made an agreement that tries to outlaw these kinds of attacks, and so could we work to make that more of an international understanding?

There's a lot of good work to be done in this area. I was just suggesting politely and very humbly that a country like Canada, which has a good intellectual and diplomatic tradition, would be in a good position to take the lead in NATO as well.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Stephen Fuhr]

I'd like to thank all three of you for participating in our discussion today.

As I mentioned at the beginning, it's our last formal meeting on this particular topic. Now we're going to be talking about drafting instructions and recommendations to the Government of Canada on how we can make things better.

This conversation started some months ago. Obviously, after the last U.S. presidential election there was a lot of talk about NATO. The conversations seemed to shift to burden sharing and expenditures almost exclusively, which are important. Most people would agree those are important, but participation, capabilities, and all sorts of other things matter too. It's important that those things are considered, and it's a more complex conversation than just talking about who's spending what on NATO. We have a lot of work to do.

I want to thank you again for your participation in this conversation. We're going to suspend right now so we can get to work.

Thank you very much.

[Proceedings continue in camera]