Thank you, Mr. Kelly, and thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you all for being here this morning. It's very nice to see you.
I was very fortunate to have a career at Global Affairs Canada for 15 years and to have served as security officer at mission twice. So this is something that is very dear to my heart.
I am encouraged by the recommendations within the report and the explanation we've had here today, but my former colleague Madame Jeffrey certainly knows that a lot of the time, when the rubber hits the road, it comes down to these nuts and bolts types of things.
When I reflect back upon my time at mission, there were generally three obstacles. I want to address each of them briefly, because they are a little bit more in the weeds, and of course give my colleagues from Foreign Affairs a chance to address each of those.
The first one is personnel. Certainly as MCOs, we were often in charge of three or four programs at a time—human resources, property, finance—and finally, often we were the security officers as well. While the training certainly encourages me, of course our colleague Madame Cameron, who served as head of mission in Lebanon, comes from my.... I consider her a contemporary. Have we addressed the capacity situation? Have we put the numbers in place for people to effectively address these problems? That's the first thing.
The second challenge I always encountered—out of fairness to the Government of Canada, the people of Canada—was procurement. Of course, this is something that is always incredibly complex and incredibly time-consuming. Procurement processes in the Government of Canada do not happen overnight; they take a lot of time. I was there during the time of MERX, which I want to say had a $75,000 threshold, so you could certainly achieve things like installing minor alarm systems, but anything that was larger required an extensive, month-long process, especially when we're looking at major missions.
The third, which Monsieur Shugart addressed briefly, was money, of course. Historically, this went the other way, where it was difficult to move from capital to operations, rather than the other way.
It sounds as though these things have been addressed, but I wanted to put forward these three obstacles that I continuously faced as a security officer at mission. That's the capacity of the personnel, the procurement processes and then finally the financing, although I am encouraged by this process you outlined.
Mr. Shugart, could you please comment on those three things, because when the rubber hits the road, those were the three obstacles I found in terms of implementing the necessities required to keep my people safe?
Thank you.