Thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity to come to share some thoughts with the committee on the good work you're doing.
I have two major focuses within my introductory comments. The first is the challenges that Canada has today and has traditionally faced in regard to its threat assessment and its capability. The second is a focus on what those threats are as they develop against Canada.
The first issue, dealing with and trying to come to terms with the threats, and coming up with the ability to then operationalize them is threefold, in my view.
The first part is the absolute overshadowing of the United States over Canadian assessments of threat. One of the issues, dating all the way back to the beginning of the Second World War, is the fact that, ultimately, the United States will ensure that any safety of North America is its top priority. As a result, it has to a certain degree confounded Canada's ability—or even willingness—to engage in a threat assessment that is independent and outside of an allied framework. That is both good and bad in terms of how we try to go forward into this future.
The second element that challenges our threat assessment is that out of all the allied countries, Canada has one of the most highly politicized procurement processes. As a result, there has been an ongoing challenge in terms of coming to an understanding of the threat we face and being able to match together the necessary tools required to meet it. Because the Americans will ultimately be there to protect for any type of threat assessment, there is almost the perception of discretionary funding, which has been one of the major challenges Canada has faced in responding to the types of dangers that Dr. Fergusson has just referred to.
The third aspect is that these two realities have created a strategic culture within Canada whereby we've become very good at the tactical level. In terms of knowing how to be interoperable with our allies and how to respond with a maximum [Inaudible—Editor] with a minimum of expenditures, we do an outstanding job. Canadian leadership, as demonstrated in Operation Reassurance, is testament to this.
The challenge we have, however, is our ability, from the strategic perspective, to understand the threat from a purely Canadian context. The reality is that many will contend that we do not have to ever do that, and that it is only in the context of the North American and western European appreciation.
In terms of understanding the changing threat environment, this is reflected in a somewhat late response to a very rapidly changing international system. I agree with what Dr. Fergusson said, that the challenges Canada is facing have been well known and developing for quite some time.
My timeline would go slightly differently. I would suggest that what we started seeing with the arrival of Putin as president of the Russian Federation was both an intent and a desire to once again return Russia to a great power. He began a series of processes that were probably not fully understood within the Canadian context. There was an effort to maintain dialogue on the Arctic co-operation side, but within the context of Arctic exceptionalism, as it is referred to.
However, even more problematic, there was a basic approach of more or less downplaying the Russian statements and actions. They had difficulties in some of their initial moves to procurement, but many of these weapons systems that Dr. Fergusson refers to did not simply appear in 2022. We can trace their initiation to the period roughly between 2005 and 2010, once again giving us warning, specifically in terms of the hypersonics, of underwater autonomous vehicles and other types of delivery systems that are a direct threat. These started becoming known as early as the 2010s.
We also saw the use of force to redraw the maps of Europe. Chechnya probably gave us a first indication of the Russian way of war. The war in Georgia clearly indicated that the ability of states to choose to join NATO was no longer going to be allowed for any neighbouring state to Russia. The beginning of the Ukrainian war in 2014 illustrated this very clearly.
Once again, the threat to Canada in the context of both collective security and its own northern security were probably telegraphed to us as early as 2012-13, but now is the time that we're starting to really give full attention to it.
I'll conclude by also observing that we have great difficulty in trying to come to terms with the threat the changing element of China represents. There are, of course, those who do not see China as a direct military threat but perhaps an economic threat, or perhaps something in between—a hybrid threat—and this is of course something we are going to have to be paying greater attention to as the international system further resets itself after the events of the Ukrainian war.
I'll leave on this point and will be happy to take any questions on this.
Thank you.