Mr. Speaker, I move that the third report of the Standing Committee on National Defence, presented on Monday, April 24, be concurred in.
It gives me pleasure to have the opportunity to debate concurrence on this important report tabled in the House of Commons.
The Standing Committee on National Defence undertook a lengthy and comprehensive study of Arctic security. Arctic security is Canadian national security and continental security, and it is under significant threat. We are in a rapidly evolving threat environment that the current policy of the government is not ready to face.
There are 26 recommendations, which are extremely important. I think it is important that we have an opportunity to get government members on the record to say whether they support this or not and to get a vote on these important recommendations.
We had a very co-operative committee. We heard from a variety of witnesses, about 46, if I recall. All parties were able to bring them to committee to hear a variety of perspectives on Arctic security and how best to undertake an improvement of our policy on Arctic security.
The New Democratic Party dissented from the other parties and has a supplemental report. I imagine its members would look forward to having an opportunity to get on the record whether they utterly reject this committee report, given their dissension on some of the points they identified in their report.
These reports are important. They inform the government. It is important that members of Parliament have the opportunity to both debate them and have their views recorded for their constituents.
The recommendations, if adopted, would be transformative for our Arctic security. Therefore, I will bring to the attention of members a number of them.
The first recommendation states, “That the Government of Canada immediately begin the process to procure undersea surveillance capabilities for Canadian Arctic waters in order to detect and monitor the presence of foreign threats to our national security.” We heard expert testimony from the Canadian Armed Forces. We heard from academic experts from Canada and other allied countries. It was really quite sobering to hear about and learn from experts the shortcomings and gaps in domain awareness.
The Arctic region is an enormous land mass that represents three-quarters of Canada's coastline, so domain awareness is extremely important for the security of Canada, for continental security and for our sovereignty. The ability to detect and monitor the presence of foreign threats in this environment is challenging. The infrastructure we have presently is not up to it, and there are many areas of domain awareness that need immediate attention.
There are some more specific recommendations I am going to get to, but the committee is recommending that the Government of Canada immediately begin its process to procure undersea surveillance capabilities.
That takes us to the second recommendation, which is a little more specific. It states, “That the Government of Canada undertake on an urgent basis a procurement process to replace the Victoria-class submarines with new submarines that are under-ice capable for operations in our Arctic waters.”
At present, Canada has a fleet of four submarines, and there is a long and tragic history of the submarine procurement that occurred a generation ago. Of these four submarines, at most we can have one in the water at a time. In 2019, I believe, we went a whole a year without a submarine sailing in Canadian waters. This is unacceptable in the current threat environment in which find ourselves given the sheer volume of our Arctic space and Arctic coastline.
However, even when these particular submarines are in the water, they cannot operate under ice for the length of time required to ensure subsurface domain awareness. These submarines cannot traverse the Northwest Passage. They cannot go from Atlantic to Pacific coasts. We desperately need superior capability for subsurface domain awareness, and the committee has recommended that this procurement be undertaken urgently.
I am not going to have time to go through all the recommendations, but one of the others is also quite specific and gets into subsurface detection and the ability, not necessarily vessel-borne, to have the sonic capability to detect submarines in our waters. In fact, we had expert testimony that said presently there is no ability to have full domain awareness, either surface awareness or subsurface awareness. This needs to be done urgently.
Part of the emerging threat environment was brought forward and expressed quite forcefully by the chief of the defence staff, General Eyre, who said that we are in the most dangerous period and that the threat environment is greater now “than at any time since the Cold War”. He said perhaps there has been no greater threat environment facing Canada since the beginning of the Second World War. This is testimony from the chief of the defence staff, and that is the urgency of the crisis of preparedness we face now. It is greater than the heights of the Cold War according to our own chief of the defence staff, and this was echoed by other experts at our committee.
The third recommendation in this report says, “That the Government of Canada reconsider its longstanding policy with respect to the U.S. Ballistic Missile Defence program.” I will note that for this one, there was division on the committee, and members will see from the supplemental report by the New Democratic Party that it did not agree with this recommendation. Again, part of the reason it is important that we have concurrence debates and concurrence votes is so that members can go on the record and declare whether or not they support important recommendations that have been made to the government.
The report notes:
Witnesses raised concerns about Canada’s lack of a missile defence system, suggesting that the country is currently vulnerable because of virtually no capability to intercept inbound missiles of any type. [Experts] referred to Canada’s lack of participation in ballistic missile defence (BMD) and to the Government of Canada’s February 2005 announcement [and decision] that Canada would not join the United States in a [ballistic missile] program.
This happened many years ago, and the threat environment is different today. We see what is happening throughout the world. We see the threat that Russia poses to its neighbouring countries and see its global ambition. It is clear that Russia considers Canada one of its targets, and we see it in a number of ways. We need to be prepared for the threat that Russia poses to our security and sovereignty in the Arctic.
We need look no further than the illegal and utterly shocking invasion of Ukraine to see the kind of threat that Russia poses to its peaceful neighbours. Canada is a peaceful neighbour in the Arctic region, but we need to adapt to the threat environment in which we find ourselves. The recommendation of this committee on revisiting the decision from 2005 is an important one that members of this House should have the opportunity to both debate and vote on. That was the third recommendation.
The fourth recommendation says:
That the Government of Canada urgently address the personnel crisis in the Canadian Armed Forces by fast-tracking the recruitment of new members, aiming to complete the recruitment process in under six months to ensure we have the level of personnel needed to defend our Arctic now and into the future.
Perhaps the greatest crisis of the Canadian Armed Forces is personnel. There are 16,000 vacant positions that need to be filled just to get us up to the strength that our current planning is based on. However, it is even worse than that, because we heard testimony in subsequent studies, and have heard reports of this as well, that there are 10,000 undertrained and undeployable members within the CAF. We need 16,000 new recruits and need to get 10,000 existing recruits up to deployable readiness. That is without undertaking a series of these other recommendations that would involve new kit, new capability or new tasks that our forces can undertake. We have to do something about this. This affects every part of the Canadian Armed Forces.
I asked one of the generals if he could identify which position needs to be filled the most. We have been told that it is everything from cooks to pilots and electricians to tank crew members. There are tremendous opportunities in the Canadian Forces, and we need the forces itself to ensure that its processes can be tightened and that we can bring people in more quickly. There is frustration expressed by some people wishing to join the forces, who say that it takes too long to get through the process and into the door. I hope we can debate many of these recommendations.
The fifth recommendation says:
That the Government of Canada undertake a comprehensive survey of our infrastructure, including military, civilian, and corporate holdings, as well as natural resources, mining and mineral operations in our Arctic for the purpose forward planning for NORAD modernization, developing a strategy for critical infrastructure investments and protecting Canadian interests from malign foreign actors.
There is a lot in that recommendation. It is about our own awareness of what is in the Arctic. The private resources, natural resources and even government resources that exist are not properly inventoried in a way to best come up with an efficient and effective strategy for NORAD modernization.
We had quite strange testimony. I thought it was incredible to learn that in Inuvik, there is a privately owned hangar adjacent to the runway. I would like to have the opportunity to travel there and see what is on the ground.
We had testimony that it is not only the only hangar in which a CF-18, or perhaps a future F-35, could be hangared, but it is also the only building where refuelling aircraft can be hangared. The government let its lease with this private facility lapse, or did not renew its contract with the operator. The operator has a business to operate. He owns the building. Its purpose is to hangar large aircraft in a remote community.
Do members know who was interested in taking over this building? The owner had inquiries, as a business that had to make a decision on whether to sell the building or find a new tenant, from the United States government and from the People's Republic of China's Ottawa personnel, who came kicking tires, looking around at this military facility in Inuvik. That is quite staggering. The testimony from the vendor was very interesting, and it reveals just how thin resources on the ground are in remote communities and remote places. We cannot park a CF-18 overnight when it is -45°C and just go out and start it in the morning. We are not talking about simply taking out a driver's licence, scraping off the windshield, getting in and going. These aircraft need to be hangared, and the personnel have to have a warm place to go inside during things like the refuelling process or any kind of maintenance. It is bitterly cold, life-threateningly cold, in this environment. The equipment needs to be stored properly, and the people who work there need to be able to stay warm.
It is things like this, figuring out what private assets exist that could be utilized in partnership with the Canadian Armed Forces or with the Canadian government. The urgency of NORAD modernization is something that is in the recommendation I just went through, and it is also in subsequent recommendations. There is, for example, the present satellite system. It is believed that the RADARSAT mission will be at end of life before we have any replacement for it, so we are looking at a gap, perhaps of years, without proper radar satellite capability in the Arctic if we do not act immediately. Therefore, this is an urgent recommendation. It goes to the broader NORAD modernization issue, where we absolutely must get our NORAD systems in partnership with the United States. This is tricky because its expenditure, as well as ours, is high, but the current government has placed parts of NORAD modernization in its budget. However, we have not seen any concrete steps to ensure that we will not have critical failures of our Arctic domain awareness. We lack and desperately need over-the-horizon radar. We need much to ensure our Arctic safety. It is all in the report, so the report is of critical importance for Canada's future Arctic security. I urge members of Parliament who have not read it to do so, to bring their voices to the debate on it and to register their support for it.
With respect to the NORAD modernization and the financing of these large procurements, the government is lapsing in much of its spending, so we are concerned that sometimes it even puts things in the budget, authorizes it through the Treasury Board and then does not even get the money out the door.
I look forward to the questions members will have about this important report.
