National Defence Committee on Feb. 2nd, 2022

[David Mulroney]

The commissioner sounded rather passive, as if she had not been briefed on this, when she spoke about it recently. If we don't have the capacity, we should darn well add it, because the responsibility of the RCMP includes the safety of Canadians, and if they can't do it, we should find somebody who can.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Thank you, Mr. Paul-Hus.

Mr. Gaheer, welcome to the committee. You have five minutes, please.

[Iqwinder Gaheer, Liberal, Mississauga—Malton, ON]

I'd like to ask Mr. Perry my questions. They're regarding the Indo-Pacific region.

Specifically, how do the armed forces of Canada and its allies in the Indo-Pacific region co-operate and share information currently?

[David Perry]

With respect to information sharing, we have relationships with some of our Five Eyes partners, two of them in particular that have a permanent presence there. Some of the British in particular visit occasionally, as we do. That's a relationship to bolster, but there's a lot of room to expand on the relationships we've established with some of the other partners in the region, such as Japan and South Korea, and look to broaden those out.

What we lack in that area of the world that we benefit from elsewhere in Europe is a standing, formalized, regular, institutionalized set of arrangements that we can reliably go back to whenever we're working an arrangement. The absence of that type of formal structure increases the value of our simply spending more time in the region—deploying there more often, establishing those relationships, setting up mechanisms and then actually trying to use them in peacetime in a training environment, so we could call upon them if we really needed to later.

[Iqwinder Gaheer, Liberal, Mississauga—Malton, ON]

You mentioned mechanisms. Could you elaborate a little more on that? What would the mechanisms look like? What partners would they be with?

[David Perry]

For things like defence co-operation agreements, understandings about different types of intelligence or logistics support and sharing, some of the most logical partners would be Japan and South Korea.

There are a number of other countries we could look to to establish deeper and more meaningful relationships. Singapore, Malaysia and potentially Vietnam come to mind. We already have a lot of those linkages with Australia.

It's also worth exploring what we could potentially gain by partnering more closely with the French, who have a presence and assets in a different part of the region, and certainly more than we do, but also by being more intentional and being more strategic long term in thinking about what's really in Canada's interests. To me that would start with a better understanding of what's actually happening there on a more consistent basis, and then trying to establish arrangements with other like-minded countries to try to support what we want to do ourselves.

[Iqwinder Gaheer, Liberal, Mississauga—Malton, ON]

How can Canada continue to respond to emerging threats in conjunction with these other nations' threats from the Indo-Pacific?

[David Perry]

I guess you could look at that in two different veins. One is what we could do five or 10 years down the road, when more of the modernization that's under way right now goes through, and that will open up a number of other options. We're going to have more modern and more capable warships, more modern and more capable fighter aircraft and surveillance assets of various different types.

In the short term, unfortunately for Canada, given where we are in our reinvestment and recapitalization process with our armed forces, we're actually entering into a period in which we're probably going to have less ability to be meaningfully engaged on a sustained basis. One of the key ways in which we've done so in the last 10 years is with our frigates, which are getting increasingly old. Some of them are approaching 30 years old, which means they're going to be less consistently available to send that long distance.

What we could try to do, though, is to look for innovative ways to send people if we can't send ships, to do rotations where that's possible and to look to get more people on the ground physically and in as many places as we can afford to.

[Iqwinder Gaheer, Liberal, Mississauga—Malton, ON]

That's great. Thank you.

I'm just on time, I think.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

You actually have a minute and a half. You might direct that last question to Mr. Mulroney, who not only is the representative in Taiwan and was an ambassador in China but also had some work in Afghanistan. I'm sure he has an opinion.

[Iqwinder Gaheer, Liberal, Mississauga—Malton, ON]

Mr. Mulroney.

[David Mulroney]

Sure.

I felt a sense of nostalgia as Mr. Perry was answering that question, because I remember seeing HMCS Regina, then one of our new Canadian patrol frigates, make its maiden voyage to Hong Kong, and I organized its program in Malaysia with the Royal Malaysian Navy.

Our rhetoric at the time was that we had these new vessels and we were going to be present in the Pacific and in Southeast Asia. The Malaysians were tremendously impressed by that, because they liked the technology and they liked the Canadian approach; it tied them into systems not from a superpower but from a like-minded partner.

As well, the Canadian Forces and the Canadian navy were fantastic in terms of the program they put on, not just for the Royal Malaysian Navy but for Malaysian charities. They got us more goodwill in a week than we could have gotten in six months, but we didn't follow up.

Our history is replete with Canadian objectives. “Canada is back” is almost, I think, a drinking game in some parts of the world. How many times will the Canadians say that...?

What we have to do, above all, is sustain our commitment to building long-term capacity. Ottawa is full of South Asia strategies, America strategies and Africa strategies. If sometimes they last a year, we're lucky.

Sticking to it and getting to know—

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Okay.

I like that idea of the drinking game.

Madam Normandin, you have two and a half minutes.

Go ahead, please.

[Christine Normandin, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I'd like to follow up on the questions my colleague Mr. Paul‑Hus asked Mr. Perry, particularly in relation to hunters.

One of the issues we've heard about is that the choice of Lockheed Martin suggests that the dice are loaded, which will result in a loss of intellectual property. The model chosen implies less technological adaptability and the fact that much of the maintenance will be done in the United States.

I'd like a general comment on the importance of the Canadian Armed Forces controlling the technology so that it can be adapted to their needs.

[David Perry]

The fundamental issue is that we're buying an airplane that is effectively wings and a jet engine wrapped around a super computer that has missiles and can do other things. It's really about the software and the computing power, the ability to bring together information that will make either of the different aircraft that we could potentially buy effectively work.

What we're looking at is, depending on which fighter jet is chosen, a very different regime for managing that. With the F-35, we would be part of a consortium that we've been a member of for approaching two decades, where the program that manages that will be managing that data, managing that intellectual property, and Canada will have access to it to leverage a lot of what's happening and being done primarily in the United States, but with the other partner members of that program.

With the Gripen, what's being proposed is to basically transfer all of that information to Canada, which would give Canada sovereign control, as has been proposed, over doing that. That would put more of the onus on Canada to actually maintain that ourselves, as well as the opportunity to do so. I don't think we would have the same type of availability to access what's happening with some of our other key allies as we will with the F-35s.

They're a very different set of potential scenarios, depending on which aircraft we choose.

[Christine Normandin, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

Should priority be given to obtaining intellectual property and internal adaptability to suit our needs?

[David Perry]

There would be a trade-off in doing that, because we would need to have the ability to manage that on an ongoing basis. We'd need to weigh that against the potential access to what we could get through the other program. I don't think there's any simple answer or clear-cut solution there.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Thank you, Madame Normandin.

Madame Mathyssen, you have two and a half minutes.

[Lindsay Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

I'd like to go back to the discussion on staffing, on the people on the front lines of the armed forces.

Mr. Perry, you spoke of the increased focus or the requirements that we have now domestically. Of course, the pressures of that will only continue to increase as we experience a great deal more climate change and the potential continuation of COVID due to our unwillingness to contribute to the global fight, as I see it.

What's the answer to that? What would you recommend in terms of that increase to the Canadian Armed Forces of retention and recruitment, and to help with that internal crisis that we're seeing?

[David Perry]

There are a couple of ways to look at it. If we're talking about keeping the same sets of rules and not increasing the size of the force, we're going to have to make some trade-offs, because we'll be less able to do other things.

In part, with the personnel piece, if we're going to have people spending more time doing that, we might want to think about giving them some specific and dedicated training, rather than having them take on some of these functions as sort of an ostensibly unplanned for but regularly anticipated function, which kind of seems to be what [Technical difficulty—Editor].

The other point of view would be that if you're going to be recruiting people and giving them the impression that they're going to be doing a certain set of activities, deploying to Latvia or to Iraq, and then they're spending a lot more of their time at home fighting fires or responding to floods, you want to make sure that's what they understand is actually going to happen. What would be unhelpful would be to have people's expectations for what they're joining the military to do be misaligned with what we're actually then sending them out to do in real life.

[Lindsay Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

All right. Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Mrs. Gallant, you have five minutes.

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

Mr. Mulroney stated the need to expand expeditionary forces, whereas Dr. Perry says we must decide if we want military to be a domestic responder or a defensive kinetic force.

Should Canada be considering preserving our weapons-trained military to combat military aggression abroad, thereby upholding our collective defence operations and agreements, but also stand up a national guard to augment civilian first responders and frontliners, and a corps of engineers to monitor the critical physical infrastructure conditions of dikes and seawalls and to be able to rapidly deploy to major disasters?

That question is for both of our witnesses

[David Perry]

There's a lot of merit in looking carefully at that type of model. That would obviously require additional resources, people and specific training. The focus has to always remain on that type of operational war footing that you described. We're not going to ever look at other public servants to deploy abroad and do those types of things, but the Canadian military has become de facto the only federal supply of easily deployable human labour to do a lot of different tasks. They also come with a command and control structure, mobility and a bunch of other aspects.

Some of the things we're asking them to do domestically could be done by some construction companies, as an example, on a standing-offer basis. We've seen the use of the Red Cross for some of the pandemic response. I'm not convinced that we necessarily need the military specifically to do other aspects of that. We could have other arrangements set in place to allow the military to focus on the other tasks that we can't ask anybody else to do.

[David Mulroney]

About those other tasks, I'll say they're not purely altruistic. If Taiwan were to fall to China, the security picture in east Asia would change overnight. We'd see the U.S. have to pull back and we might see a nuclear-armed Japan as a result. The reverberations would be felt in Canada.

I'd also remind the committee that China has very specific ideas about its role, both in the Antarctic and in the Arctic. We need to think about that. That requires some capability. We don't have to do all of the job, but not doing any of it means we have no say in how the job gets done.