Thank you very much, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for the invitation to speak to you today about Arctic security.
I would also place the discussion today against the backdrop of Russia's brutal war against Ukraine, which is demonstrating to me in a very real manner the implications of the return to great power competition identified in the 2017 “Strong, Secure, Engaged” defence policy. Both Russia and China continue to invest in military modernization programs, and they employ those modernized armed forces in concert with other elements of state power in ways that threaten western and Canadian interests.
Given both those countries' demonstrated and expressed interest in the Arctic and their increasing capability to take military action, either through the Arctic against targets in the rest of Canada or North America or against targets in the Canadian Arctic itself, Canada needs to act with an urgency that it is not demonstrating yet to strengthen its Arctic defences.
The announcement this summer of a package of investments supporting NORAD modernization is a good start to bolstering our Arctic defences, but we should look to build on those investments in defence infrastructure and aerospace assets by adding subsurface naval capabilities and integrated air and missile defences to improve our ability both to understand what is happening in our coastal waters and to defend Canada against missile threats.
However, unless substantial changes are made, we can expect that those investments could take between two and three decades to actually produce operationally employable defence assets.
Let me cite a few somewhat depressing examples to illustrate how glacial the pace of our Arctic defence investments has been recently. The Nanisivik naval refuelling station was launched as a government initiative in 2006, but after repeated delays, the last information I could find was that it is not slated to open until 2023.
Of the five projects intended to renew the Canadian Armed Forces core equipment platforms in the 2008 “Canada First” defence strategy, three of them—the replacement of our frigates and destroyers, new fighter aircraft and maritime patrol planes—would meaningfully improve our Arctic defences. None of the three projects that I just cited has yet resulted in the delivery of a single plane or ship. Under current schedules, they won't until between 2025 and the mid-2030s.
The observations I would make relevant to the committee's study about our demonstrated very slow ability to improve Arctic defence capability are twofold. First, we need to spend at least as much time and effort on improving our ability to implement the defence policies and funded investments that we have today as we do on considering additional future plans and investments. Second, when taking decisions today about the future, we need to account for our ability to respond to possible future changes in our security environment in the decades to come, not just our assessment of the world around us right now, given the time it takes to implement these types of decisions.
With respect to my first observation, I'd encourage the committee to focus throughout its study on what the Government of Canada collectively is doing to improve its ability to actually deliver more Arctic-focused information management, information technology infrastructure and equipment investments.
With respect to my second observation, I'd encourage the committee to think about the practical implications of how long it takes us to improve our Arctic defences and the impact of that on how we should assess military threats to the Canadian Arctic. When people talk about potential military threats, they're generally assessing the military capabilities that countries like Russia and China possess, how they could be employed to threaten Canada's Arctic, and whether or not they actually will be employed. In other words, they're evaluating a combination of the military capabilities that already exist right now with the potential hostile intent to use them.
As we're seeing today in Ukraine, autocratic great powers can and do use the military capabilities they develop with hostile intent when they deem it important. They do so in ways many of us in the West have difficulty understanding. Since those great powers have already developed the military capability to threaten Canada's Arctic and their intent to do so could change in a matter of days or weeks, the fact that it would take us decades to do anything about it should cause us some significant concern.
We need to start acting with significantly increased urgency to improve our Arctic defences today and start planning for the future on the assumption that the threats to our north are already real now and will worsen over time.
Thank you.