Evidence of meeting #126 for National Defence in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was training.
A video is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Don Stewart Conservative Toronto—St. Paul's, ON
Does that put our junior soldiers, who have less experience, at any greater risk?
LGen Stephen Kelsey
I think the same level of training is assured. In fact, the brigade was validated last weekend and got lauded from the secretary general and from many CHODs for the integration of Canada, the mindset and the complexity.
The added advantage is that it was done in the face of Russia, so we gained the deterrence effect of doing it there.
Conservative
Don Stewart Conservative Toronto—St. Paul's, ON
How long would you estimate that this training takes once soldiers arrive in Latvia?
Conservative
Don Stewart Conservative Toronto—St. Paul's, ON
I would imagine that it's also ongoing. Every day there's something additional, and you're never done.
LGen Stephen Kelsey
I see the question, yes.
There's individual training to prepare individuals. There's collective training by groups. Then there's continuation training. When we deploy people to places like Latvia or elsewhere, it's a continuous maintenance of a level of readiness.
Conservative
Don Stewart Conservative Toronto—St. Paul's, ON
Are there any other NATO nations that send their troops into theatre in the same manner?
LGen Stephen Kelsey
In fact, Italy and France do the same thing in Romania. For their combat readiness evaluation, they do it by computer-assisted exercises.
Canada's leading the way and was recognized last week for actually doing close-combat manoeuvres under a division construct, showing other allies how it can be done. We have our folks permanently there. Other nations often rotate or return to their home nations on the weekend, for example. Canada is actually demonstrating our competitive advantage in our approach.
Conservative
Don Stewart Conservative Toronto—St. Paul's, ON
Deputy Minister and Lieutenant-General, the most recent directive on reconstitution included a risk assessment on achieving recruitment targets. One of the risks highlighted was that “widespread misinformation campaigns creating a lack of public confidence in national institutions could impede efforts to reconstitute.”
I'm wondering this: How could Russian disinformation regarding Ukraine and Canada's efforts and support for Ukraine throughout Operation Unifier affect Canadians' trust and support in our institutions and military?
Deputy Minister, Department of National Defence
How about I start and then pass it on? In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if our CSE colleagues also have views to share.
What we're worried about—as, I think, everybody is—is the trust in the institution. Is this an armed forces that you would want to work for, to which you would want to be recruited? Is it a mission that you believe in? Are we doing the right thing?
This would be our concern with regard to incentivizing recruitment for those we need in the armed forces.
Caroline Xavier Chief, Communications Security Establishment
What I would add is that the point of misinformation and disinformation is to create that distrust that my colleagues spoke about.
What we have been doing at the CSE is combatting and countering that misinformation and disinformation that comes from foreign actors in the form of the use of our foreign cyber-operations. We are able to use our toolsets to help defend against those types of activities.
Conservative
Don Stewart Conservative Toronto—St. Paul's, ON
We are seeing disinformation being populated in our social networks here in Canada. How do you defend against that once something's already been blasted out through a network and people believe it? They usually believe the first thing they see and not the second or third thing that defends against it. How can you defend against that?
Chief, Communications Security Establishment
That is fundamentally one of the concerns that we collectively should have. This is why the management of misinformation and disinformation has to be a whole-of-society role.
One of the things that we have done on behalf of the Government of Canada is put in place a misinformation and disinformation campaign over the last two fiscal years. We have worked hard to educate Canadians to be more critical in their thinking, by looking at and questioning more the information they're getting.
Conservative
Don Stewart Conservative Toronto—St. Paul's, ON
This may be outside of your realm of expertise, but do you see that we're no longer teaching our children to be critical thinkers? We see this a lot in media. There's an evaluation of our education systems in that we're now telling children how to think and are not asking them to learn how to critically think.
Chief, Communications Security Establishment
It is beyond my capacity to talk about how our educational system works. However, what I would say is that in the last month of October, during Cyber Security Awareness Month, we ran a campaign to really raise the awareness of the many generations of our community, including our young people, to really be those critical thinkers.
Liberal
Marcus Powlowski Liberal Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON
Good morning.
The minister brought some good news this morning. He said that the NASAMS system that the Government of Canada had paid for was now in the hands of Ukraine. This is fantastic news given the daily news we get of Russian attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure and the death of Ukrainian civilians.
I wonder if somebody could talk a little bit about the NASAMS system. When I look it up, you see these trucks with these little boxes on the back that shoot off missiles. Is it one truck we're sending them, or is it a whole bunch of trucks? What is the NASAMS system and what size of an area does it protect?
LGen Stephen Kelsey
I don't profess to be an expert in air defence systems, but what I can tell you is about the NASAMS system versus what you described, which is HIMARS, a vehicle-based, rocket-propelled precision strike weapon. Those are two different things.
All that is to say that it's nice to know that we're now delivering what our allies in Ukraine have asked for. The system is actually going to make a meaningful difference to their fight against Russia.
Liberal
Marcus Powlowski Liberal Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON
I take it you're not going to give me any more particulars about the NASAMS system versus the Patriot system and what this protects from. If you're not experts in this, that's fine.
Am I correct in saying that you don't have the expertise to answer specifics about that system?
Liberal
Marcus Powlowski Liberal Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON
Okay.
How about this one? We all know about Operation Unifier. We had the supplementary estimates, and we know we're giving $760 million more to Ukraine.
What are we doing to continue to train Ukrainian troops? Certainly this is a big issue in Ukraine. The troops on the front line are getting very fatigued, some of them having fought now for a thousand days. They're running short on soldiers. They certainly need to be training new brigades and my understanding is that they are.
What form of assistance is Canada providing in training Ukrainian soldiers?
Deputy Minister, Department of National Defence
I can start and then hand it over to the vice.
A huge range is the short answer, and it's very clearly targeted at what the Ukrainians need. The training that we provide is discussed within NATO as a direct result of conversations with the Armed Forces of Ukraine, where they are categoric about what it is they need and when.
Part of the issue is how quickly and in which locations can we provide training. Right now, we have about 350 members of the Canadian Armed Forces providing a diverse range of training to Ukrainians in the U.K., as well as in Poland. Also, there is a range of combat, engineering, medic and leadership development training and also some other training of aircrew, in fact.
Vice, do you have anything to add?
LGen Stephen Kelsey
The only thing I would complement is that the nature of the demand is constantly changing because the nature of the fight is constantly changing. It's not just what the Ukrainians want. It's actually close collaboration with allies to match who has the best competencies and available resources to match as quickly as possible.
We have good young Canadians out there doing great work, based on what the Ukrainians are looking for.
Liberal
Marcus Powlowski Liberal Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON
You say that we have Canadians doing training in Poland and the U.K. Do we have groups of Canadians based there who are specifically training groups of Ukrainians, or are they Canadians embedded within British forces, Polish forces, working with them to train Ukrainians?
LGen Stephen Kelsey
It's a little different for every circumstance, but essentially that's it. We have Canadians working with Brits training Ukrainians, and we have Ukrainians embedded with Canadian organizations. It's whatever satisfies the best way to deliver the training as fast as possible.
