I should admit up front that I'm probably prejudiced, having spent a goodly number of years working in this area, but I think there has been a lot of progress over the last little while and there's much more co-operation and collaboration.
But I would argue two things. One is that the world is becoming much, much more complex, and I think it could be argued that we need more resourcing. When I used to work for the government, the last thing you wanted to do was embarrass your minister by saying you wanted more money. I'm not really saying that now, but if you consider the Cold War to terrorism and the current cyber issues and great power conflict generally, yes, all of these institutions have had more resources, but the resources may not be enough today, so I would ask that.
I guess the other issue I would note is this. I was told over the years by several politicians from both sides that there aren't very many votes on national security, and that's one of the reasons why governments are sometimes hesitant to take some of the steps you've implied. However much politicians may get frustrated with officials, officials do take the lead from the political side of things, and I think we need to be a little bit more proactive sometimes than we are, because technology is moving, the threat is moving, and we seem to be playing catch-up.
I don't direct this at any government or any official. It just seems to be the way we do it, largely because, if you're the Minister of Finance or the President of the Treasury Board, the last thing you want to do is to say every two years, “Here's another quarter of a billion dollars.” I'm just picking a number, but you know, there are technological changes, some of which Mr. Ryland talked about, and there are a whole raft of others. It's very hard for government to keep up with these things without a constant ongoing effort, and at the same time, you're worrying about Russia and China and North Korea and Iran. You're worrying about international criminal groups. I think we're beginning to underestimate the problem with terrorists just because we've whacked a few of them.
So, as a long answer to a short question, I think generally speaking people are doing as well as they can, but it's very difficult to galvanize everybody who works on this—political officials and the private sector—unless there's some consensus on how serious the threat is.
I would say, with great respect, there's no such consensus in Canada.